The Abbott Institute
501 (c) (3)
The Robert S. Abbott Race Unity Institute envisions a community where healing and reconciliation are commonplace amongst people of all identities, social justice is upheld and honored, and people honestly engage in history in order to live more truthfully in the present. Ultimately, we strive to influence thought, which leads to changed hearts, which leads to changed behavior. --
OUR VISION
The Robert S. Abbott Race Unity Institute envisions a community where healing and reconciliation are commonplace amongst people of all identities, social justice is upheld and honored, and people honestly engage in history in order to live more truthfully in the present.
OUR MISSION
The Robert S. Abbott Race Unity Institute was founded to actively support racial and religious harmony, advocate for social justice and foster relationships between people of multi-cultural backgrounds with the purpose of transcending and ending divisions and discrimination based on differences.
OUR VALUES
We embrace, as our core values, harmony, understanding, respect, compassion, love, equality, diversity, excellence, empathy, forgiveness, cooperation, truth, trust, integrity, gratitude, and unity.
We believe that only through accomplishing unity among races can peace at any strata of society be attained.
We believe in expanding understanding and respect for people of all cultures and in building on the common core beliefs and values of all people.
OUR PROGRAMS
The Robert S. Abbott Race Unity Institute holds:
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The 1619 Project
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.
AMERICAN SKIN
by Ken Bruen
Stephen Blake is a good man blown in bad directions. He and girlfriend Siobhan, best friend Tommy, IRA terrorist Stapleton, and a particularly American sort of psychopath named Dade, are all on a collision course somewhere on the road between the dive bars of New York, and the pitiless desert of the Southwest.
THE WILLIE LYNCH LETTER AND THE MAKING OF A SLAVE
by Willie Lynch
The Willie Lynch Letter and The Making of A Slave is a speech delivered by Willie Lynch to an audience on the bank of the James River in Virginia in 1712 regarding control of slaves within the colony. The speaker, William Lynch, is said to have been a slave owner in the West Indies, and was summoned to Virginia in 1712; in part due to several slave revolts in the area prior to his visit, and more so because of his reputation of being an authoritarian and strict slave master. The Willie Lynch Letter is an account of a short speech given by Willie Lynch, in which he tells other slave owners that he has discovered the -secret- to controlling enslaved Africans by setting them against one another.
SUNDOWN TOWNS: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
by James W. Loewen
Bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen, exposes the secret communities and hotbeds of racial injustice that sprung up throughout the twentieth century unnoticed, forcing us to reexamine race relations in the United States.
In this groundbreaking work, bestselling sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks could not live there—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. These towns used everything from legal formalities to violence to create homogenous Caucasian communities—and their existence has gone unexamined until now. For the first time, Loewen takes a long, hard look at the history, sociology, and continued existence of these towns, contributing an essential new chapter to the study of American race relations.
Sundown Towns combines personal narrative, history, and analysis to create a readable picture of this previously unknown American institution all written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness.
THE NEW JIM CROW: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.”
Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK: A Work of Nonfiction
by Melissa Fay Greene
Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and a New York Times Notable book, Praying for Sheetrock is the story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia--and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Somehow the sweeping changes of the civil rights movement managed to bypass McIntosh entirely. It took one uneducated, unemployed black man, Thurnell Alston, to challenge the sheriff and his courthouse gang--and to change the way of life in this community forever. "An inspiring and absorbing account of the struggle for human dignity and racial equality" (Coretta Scott King)
JUST MERCY: A story of justice and redemption
by Bryan Stevensor
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction • Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize • An American Library Association Notable Book
“Every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so . . . a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.”—David Cole, The New York Review of Books
“Searing, moving . . . Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela.”—Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
by Douglas A. Blackmon
A Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the “Age of Neoslavery,” the American period following the Emancipation Proclamation in which convicts, mostly black men, were “leased” through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments.
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter. By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS
by Isabel Wilkerson
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
WHITE FRAGILITY: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
by Robin DiAngelo
he New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.
In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively
BLOOD AT THE ROOT: A Racial Cleansing In America
by Patrick Phillips
“Gripping and meticulously documented.”―Don Schanche Jr., Washington Post
Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.
National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s. In precise, vivid prose, Blood at the Root delivers a “vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America” (Congressman John Lewis).
THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS - by Ta-Nehisi Coates
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
The groundbreaking first book on black reparations, essential reading for the twenty-first century
Originally published in 1972, Boris Bittker's riveting study of America's debt to African-Americans was well ahead of its time. Published by Toni Morrison when she was an editor, the book came from an unlikely source: Bittker was a white professor of law at Yale University who had long been ambivalent about the idea of reparations. Through his research into the history and theory of reparations-namely the development and enforcement of lawsdesigned to compensate groups for injustices imposed on them-he found that it wasn't a'crazy, far-fetched idea.' In fact, beginning with post-Civil War demands for forty acres and a mule, African-American thinkers have long made the case that compensatory measures are justified not only for the injury of slavery but for the further setbacks of almost a century of Jim Crow laws and forced school and job segregation, measures that effectively blocked African-Americans from enjoying the privledges of citizenship.
The publication of important recent books by black scholars like Randall Robinson and the growth of a highly vocal reparations movement in the beginning of this century make this book, long unavailable, essential reading. Bittker carefully illuminates the historical provisions and statutes for legitimate claims to reparations, the national and international precedents for such claims, and most important, the obstacles to a national policy of reparations.
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES - by Howard Zinn
"A wonderful, splendid book--a book that should be ready by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." --Howard Fast
With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this edition of the classic national bestseller chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
OUR HISTORY
The Robert S. Abbott Race Unity Institute is named for a son of former slaves who became the most influential African-American publisher in the western hemisphere. The Institute was founded for the purpose of fostering relationships with peoples of varying multi-cultural backgrounds. The Institute actively supports the vision of racial and religious harmony, as well as social justice, by sponsoring events throughout the year.
Robert S Abbott was a native son of the Golden Isles, Georgia, he started a newspaper empire with a quarter. He influenced the lives of millions. His struggles to shine light on the principles of justice and righteousness, his education of his race to demand their right to equality, his ceaseless efforts to make the world aware of the atrocities his race endured; these battles he waged more than a century ago.
Born on November 24, 1868, on St. Simons Island, Georgia. His parents Thomas and Flora Abbott, were former slaves who had received their freedom from Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Abbott attended both Claflin College in Orangeburg, S.C. and Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) where he trained as a printer and graduated in 1896. He graduated from Kent College of Law in Chicago with a law degree in 1899. On May 5, 1905, he published the first edition of The Chicago Defender which consisted of four sixteen-by-twenty-inch pages. He elevated The Defender to national prominence with his entrepreneurial skills. By 1929, The Defender occupied a three-story building with its own printing press, a large production staff and a circulation of 250,000 copies weekly with readership across the country. It was once heralded as "The World's Greatest Weekly." Widely regarded even today as the greatest single force in African-American journalism, it also made Robert one of the first self-made millionaires of African-American descent.
Launched in 1929, the Bud Billiken Parade was quickly followed by the Bud Billiken Club, credited with significantly reducing juvenile crime in Chicago. Ninety+ years later, the parade still attracts thousands of participants each year and is ranked as the second largest parade in the United States. Robert was stricken with tuberculosis in 1935, which in combination with Bright’s disease, led to his death on February 29, 1940 at the age of 71.
In 1944 the S.S. Robert S. Abbott was launched in San Francisco. One of only 13 World War II liberty ships named for outstanding African-Americans.
His home at 4742 South Grand Boulevard in Chicago (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive) is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
A school was named in his honor; Robert S. Abbott Elementary located at 3630 S. Wells.
WE WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU!
Email: RaceUnity@theabbottinstitute.org
USMail: P.O. Box 1834 | Brunswick, GA 31521