A Touch of Greatness: A History of Tennessee State University (2013)

A Touch of Greatness: A History of Tennessee State University is the first book covering the narrative history of the institution from 1909 to the present. TSU is one of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The TSU story is about the freedom of an institution of higher education; about the complex economic, political, psychological, and social forces that affected the institution as they would affect any institution in a dynamic, multi-racial society.

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America’s Historically Black Colleges: A Narrative History 1837-2009 (2011)

Finally, in one-volume, this narrative provides a comprehensive history of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s). The book concludes that race, the Civil Rights movements, and black and white philanthropy had much effect on the development of these minority institutions. The book shows how black colleges began that arduous nineteenth-century journey, providing higher education for former slaves and their African-American descendants—as well as for other students, struggling for institutional survival most of the time, but adapted themselves to new missions and adjusted to recent and challenging developments in American higher education. Far from being just institutions of higher education, the HBCUs have helped to shape our culture and society

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How It Came To Be (2006)

How It Came to Be serves as a continuation of how the Boyd family contributed to the development of religious publishing in the African-American context. It is a sequel to A Black Man’s Dream and covers essential details from R.H. Boyd’s seminal dream up to the present generation of Boyd leadership in the industry of religious publishing. In his keynote address to the 2004 National Baptist Sunday School and Baptist Training Union Congress, Dr. Gardner Taylor described the Boyd family as “four generations of prominence.”

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The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee: A Narrative History (2005)

While many books have focused on the national campaign and prominent leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, this is the first book to examine the civil rights movement in the state of Tennessee. Bobby L. Lovett proposes that African Americans have always had a civil rights movement in Tennessee, even during slavery. Lovett explores early Jim Crow Tennessee, public school desegregation since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, sit-in and public desegregation activities, politics and civil rights, and the desegregation of higher education. This book fills a gap in the historical record of the civil rights movement and is an important addition to studies of the movement both in Tennessee and in the nation

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The African American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930 (1999)

Dr. Lovett presents a complex analysis of black experience in Nashville during the years between 1780 and 1930, exploring the impact of civil rights, education, politics, religion, business, and neighborhood development on this African-American community.

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A Black Man’s Dream: 100 Years (1993)

This book is a documented account of the life of Dr. Richard Henry Boyd and his struggle to establish the nation’s foremost African-American religious publishing company.

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CO-AUTHORED BOOKS

The Art of William Edmondson (2000)

Profiles of African Americans in Tennessee (1996)