Print       
Close Window


Clark Atlanta University Professor Daniel Black Discusses The Coming with TV Personality Marc Lamont Hill



CAU Author’s Breakthrough Novel heralds as a Timely, Clarion Call 
in the Wake of Racial Chaos 

ATLANTA (Nov. 11, 2015) — Their birth names were Atiba, Binta, Hassan….  We never knew them.  Yet, they intimate their innermost thoughts, fears, yearnings and regrets in Clark Atlanta University (CAU) faculty author Daniel Black’s fifth and newest novel, The Coming (St. Martin’s Press, 2015, 226 pp.)  The soul-shaking book is so powerful that leaders, clergy, and academics nationwide are praising it as a crucial Sankofa moment:  an opportunity to learn from the past lessons that must inform the future.
Journalist, author, and TV personality Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D., was so moved after reading The Coming that he decided to engage Dr. Black in a free public discussion of the book Monday, Nov. 23, at 6:30pm in Clark Atlanta University’s Davage Auditorium.  CAU President Ronald A. Johnson will host the conversation.  A book signing will follow.
The Coming, Johnson says, is a “timely, clarion call from the darkest chapters of our past to our youth in a time when racial injustices and the rampant onslaught of violence against African-American youth continue to accelerate despite compelling evidence that has been captured through the use of new technologies.  This book is quintessentially an idea that matters,” Johnson adds, “and our obligation is to embrace and apply it—with urgency and intentionality--toward solutions than will heal and build up our communities and our nation.”
  The book unveils one of the most horrifying chapters in history, the Middle Passage, through the eyes of the brave souls who endured and survived it.  During the Middle Passage, Africans by the thousands were captured, kidnapped from their homelands, and forced into shocking conditions for the sole purpose of enslavement that, today, continues to stain the social, economic, and political lives of Africans throughout the Diaspora.  National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson, author of the seminal work Middle Passage, calls The Coming “powerful and beautiful…a work to be proud of.”
Award-winning author Daniel Omotosho Black, Ph.D., presently serves as a full professor in Clark Atlanta’s Department of African-American Studies.  Reared in Blackwell, Ark., he earned a full scholarship to Clark College (now CAU) and majored in English, graduating magna cum laude in 1988. He was awarded the prestigious Oxford Modern British Studies Scholarship and spent his junior year studying at Oxford University in England. He subsequently was granted a full graduate fellowship to Temple University where he earned the Ph.D. in African-American Studies.  One of his dissertation advisors, Poet Sonia Sanchez, spoke the words that now capture the essence of this book: “it was the coming that was bad….”
Black is the author of They Tell Me Of A Home, The Sacred Place, Twelve Gates to the City and Perfect Peace, which was named the Arkansas State Library’s 2014 selection for “If All Arkansas Read the Same Book.”  All of his books are published by St. Martin’s Press.
“These brave souls,” Black says, “reside deep in my spirit.  They have a righteous claim on that space.  I am simply a vessel through which their voices cry out to our young men and women, exhorting them toward strength and courage, summoning the depths of their still-developing character in the midst of great peril—black men being killed by police, black women dying in jail, black youth invoking violence upon one another.  The wisdom required to overcome such extreme pain and chaos was produced and modeled for     us centuries ago…in the coming.”

©2008 Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education
www.atlantahighered.org | 404.651.2668 | arche@atlantahighered.org