The Library and Dauphin County Commissioners will launch a new initiative to honor the life and works of Hari Jones at the Madeline L. Olewine Memorial Library on October 10 at 5:00 pm. RSVP is required to attend. Contact Ruby at rdoub@dauphinc.org for more information.
Harold (Hari) Jones was a writer, lecturer, historian, curator, and motivational speaker. He was one of the foremost authorities on the role of African Americans in the Civil War.
He spent 12 years as assistant director and curator at the African American Civil War Freedom Foundation and Museum in Washington D.C. In this role, he curated the permanent exhibit titled “The Glorious March to Liberty.”
Over the course of his career, Jones appeared in over 50 television programs and documentaries shown on C-SPAN, Fox News, NBC, PBS, BBC, the American Heroes Channel, the History Channel, the Smithsonian Channel, and many other outlets.
What’s his tie to Dauphin County?
He served on the Board of Directors of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, where he presented his award-winning lecture series, “The Lost Story,” in 2015.
The Library’s Hari Jones Collection is based on the bibliographies provided to us by people who knew Jones. They are either titles Jones would have read or reflected topics that were of interest. Many of the books in the collection are reflective of his focus on African Americans and the Civil War.
Based on the provided bibliographies, however, books about the African American experience in general – regardless of time period, reader age, and genre – are also included. You can view the entire collection online or by searching The Library’s catalog for “The Hari Jones Collection.”
Here’s a Sneak Peek at Some Titles in the Collection…
Abolitionists of South Central Pennsylvania
by Cooper H. Wingert
Close to the Mason-Dixon line, South Central Pennsylvania was a magnet for slave catchers and abolitionists alike. Influenced by religion and empathy, local abolitionists risked their reputations, fortunes and lives in the pursuit of what they believed was right. The sister of Benjamin Lundy, one of America’s most famous abolitionists, married into an Adams County family and spent decades helping runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. National figures such as Frederick Douglass toured the region, delivering antislavery orations to mixed receptions. In 1859, John Brown planned his Harpers Ferry raid from Chambersburg while local abolitionists concealed his identity. Author Cooper Wingert reveals the history of the antislavery movement in South Central Pennsylvania.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as “brave and bold,” this book challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.
by Robert Coles
For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
by Ira Berlin
Today most Americans identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation.
by Frederick Douglass (and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor)
Here in this Library of America volume are collected Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographical narratives, now recognized as classics of both American history and American literature. Writing with the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made him a brilliantly effective spokesman for the abolition of slavery and equal rights, Douglass shapes an inspiring vision of self-realization in the face of monumental odds.