By turns hilarious, candid, and heartbreaking, this powerful book takes the strait jacket off Black history.
A refreshing, insightful, sacrilegious take on African American history, Crazy as Hell explores the site of America’s greatest contradictions. The notables of this book are the runaways and the rebels, the badass and funky, the activists and the inmates—from Harriet Tubman, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali to B’rer Rabbit, Single Mamas, and Wakandans—but are they crazy as hell, or do they simply defy the expectations designated for being Black in America?
With humor and insight, scholars and writers V. Efua Prince and Hoke S. Glover III (Bro. Yao) offer brief breakdowns of one hundred influential, archetypal, and infamous figures, building a new framework that emphasizes their humanity. Including an introduction by MacArthur Fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts and peppered with little-known historical facts and PSAs that get real about the Black experience, Crazy as Hell captures the tenacious, irreverent spirit that accompanies a long struggle for freedom.
About the authors: Hoke S. Glover III also known as Brother Yao is founder and former Co-Owner of Karibu Books, one of the Nation's largest Black Bookstores 1993-2008. He has authored two poetry collections. One Shoe Marching Towards Heaven, AWP, 2019, and Inheritance, Willow Books, 2017. He is currently Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University. He spends his free time practicing taiji.
V Efua Prince was awarded a 2023-2024 Humanities Center Faculty Fellow to complete her manuscript titled, Laundry: How dirt, water, and cleaning clothes became the real work of America, which explores laundry as metonymy, in order to understand critical aspects of African American women’s historical relationship to home, family, work, and industry.
Prince received her PhD from the University of Michigan in English Language and Literature after completing a doctoral thesis titled Finding a Place of My Own: Home and the Paradox of Blues Expressiveness.
Prince is a professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and has served as a director of Black Studies at Allegheny College, the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, and a fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center.
The moderator: Joshua M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the SNCC Legacy Project and is the senior content producer at the Africa World Now Project. He was the co-coordinator of the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles Oral History Project and organizes with Washington DC’s Positive Black Folks in Action. In addition, he serves on the editorial boards of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, Siyabonana: The Journal of Africana Studies, and The Journal of Black Studies.