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Get Your Knee Off Our Necks: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter Audiobook
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The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing trial of Derek Chauvin for murder a year later has rubbed raw the bloodiest stain on the United States’ history and its world reputation. The nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds during which Chauvin’s knee crushed the spark of life out of Floyd was not unusual in the history of the United States. Before the US Civil War, slaves were routinely beaten to death for disobeying orders or running away, then often lynched. In roughly two centuries, Blacks have achieved nominal freedom. But, as this audiobook’s opening chapter and expert essays that follow indicate, freedom has been conditional based on inequity of wealth, social, and legal discrimination. None of this is new in the United States; what is new is the number of people rising up in protest, a figure in the millions around the world after Floyd’s murder.
This audiobook supplies a readable, scholarly account of recent issues in race and racism in the United States that will be useful for general readers, undergraduate students, and their professors. It will be useful in many fields, including Black studies, other ethnic pursuits, United States history, law, criminal justice, intercultural communication, et al. The work contains a powerful historical narrative followed by several important essays on subjects including George Floyd’s murder, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and many other victims of systematic racism.
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About the Authors
Bruce E. Johansen is a Frederick W. Kayser research professor emeritus for Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he taught and researched from 1982 to 2019, then retired with emeritus status. He has published fifty-two books in several fields: history, anthropology, law, the Earth sciences, and others. Johansen’s writing has been published, debated, and reviewed in many academic venues, as well as in many popular newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times and National Geographic.
Adebowale Akande is one of the world’s top contributors and productive cross-cultural researchers for research publications. He has held faculty appointments at several international universities. In 1998, he was appointed the first black full professor at a white most prestigious university in South Africa. Akande’s major research interests vary but mainly focus on relationships among transnational self-esteem, learning, power, political influence, prejudice. He is also known as a popularizer of cross-cultural studies.
About the Narrators
Traber Burns worked for thirty-five years in regional theater, including the New York, Oregon, and Alabama Shakespeare festivals. He also spent five years in Los Angeles appearing in many television productions and commercials, including Lost, Close to Home, Without a Trace, Boston Legal, Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Gilmore Girls, and others.
Adenrele Ojo is an actress, dancer, and audiobook narrator, winner of over a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2018. She made her on-screen debut in My Little Girl, starring Jennifer Lopez, and has since starred in several other films. She has also performed extensively with the Philadelphia Dance Company. As the daughter of John E. Allen, Jr., founder and artistic director of Freedom Theatre, the oldest African American theater in Pennsylvania, is no stranger to the stage. In 2010 she performed in the Fountain Theatre’s production of The Ballad of Emmett Till, which won the 2010 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best Ensemble. Other plays include August Wilson’s Jitney and Freedom Theatre’s own Black Nativity, where she played Mary.
Janina Edwards, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a native of Chicago and a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts acting program. Her 2016 performance of Voice of Freedom was a finalist for the Audie Award.
Kevin Kenerly, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, earned a BA at Olivet College. A longtime member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he has acted in more than twenty seasons, playing dozens of roles.
Adenrele Ojo is an actress, dancer, and audiobook narrator, winner of over a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2018. She made her on-screen debut in My Little Girl, starring Jennifer Lopez, and has since starred in several other films. She has also performed extensively with the Philadelphia Dance Company. As the daughter of John E. Allen, Jr., founder and artistic director of Freedom Theatre, the oldest African American theater in Pennsylvania, is no stranger to the stage. In 2010 she performed in the Fountain Theatre’s production of The Ballad of Emmett Till, which won the 2010 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best Ensemble. Other plays include August Wilson’s Jitney and Freedom Theatre’s own Black Nativity, where she played Mary.
Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.
David Colacci is an actor and director who has directed and performed in prominent theaters nationwide. His credits include roles from Shakespeare to Albee, as well as extensive work on new plays. As a narrator, he has won numerous Earphones Awards, earned Audie Award nominations, and been included in Best Audio of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. He was a resident actor and director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992.
Laurie Keller is the acclaimed author-illustrator of Do Unto Otters; Arnie, the Doughnut; and The Scrambled States of America, among numerous others. She grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, and always loved to draw, paint, and write stories. She earned a BFA at Kendall College of Art and Design, then worked at Hallmark as a greeting card illustrator for over seven years, until one night she got an idea for a children’s book. She quit her job, moved to New York City, and had soon published her first book. She loved living in New York, but she has now returned to her home state, where she lives in a little cottage in the woods on the shore of Lake Michigan.