13 Books Published by Middle Passage Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

In Reparations! Hutchinson examines the many facets of the raging debate over reparations. He explores the history of reparations proposals. He compares reparations paid to other groups for injustices including Germany’s reparations payout to Holocaust survivors to the demand for slavery reparations.

He assesses the arguments for and against reparations and why it has become such a racially polarizing issue. He asks can you put a price tag on slavery reparations and what is that price to be made for slavery’s two-century horror. A huge part of the calamitous legacy is the continuing towering economic and racial inequities Hutchinson says that whether one backs or opposes reparations it’s an issue that will continue to ignite prickly passions within and without America’s racial fault lines.

In The Chokehold, political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson details the controversy over police and civilian use of chokeholds, how the courts, the police and the public view the use of chokeholds, and the always lurking issue of racial bias in its use. Hutchinson asks, is it a legitimate tactic to protect, or a deadly cause of physical mayhem. The Chokehold confronts that challenging and troubling question.

The Midterms Why They are So Important and So Ignored, political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson offers fresh insights into a part of the American political process that has meant so much to the governance of the country. But at the same time has received so little public attention and so little overall voter participation and interest. So little that it represents an embarrassing stain on our democracy.

A Young Person’s Guide to Classical Music is a fast-paced, highly readable basic primer for those young persons interested in classical music or who want to develop an interest in it. It’s a layperson’s guide to standard musical terms, instruments, selected composers, influential works, the styles, form, and structure common to classical music. It presents a capsulized history of the different periods in classical music’s evolution.

It includes many important compositions from different periods of the music’s evolution as recommended listening. There are factoids about the best-known composers, the instruments, and their works.

Classical musical audiences are getting older, and older. If they are not replaced by a new crop of younger listeners that means more empty seats, and even less revenue. At the same time, costs to run an orchestra, pay staff and management, and the musicians, aren’t going down. Eventually, there’s a break point. The result could be staff cutbacks, fewer concerts, and in some cases orchestras folding completely.

In Bring Back the Poll Tax! The GOP War on Voting Rights Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains this and much more:

*"Write in the space below a section of the Mississippi Constitution and interpret it"

1955 Mississippi Literacy Test Question-

*How Major Corporations Bankroll voter suppression laws
*Florida and Georgia’s purge of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters prevented the election of Black Governors in those states
*How Felon vote bans still disenfranchise millions of Blacks in nearly all states
*How Trump won the White House with vote suppression
*How GOP controlled state legislatures control the voting process
*Why the GOP will never do away with the Electoral College
*The GOP Plan to take Back Congress and the White House in 2022 and 2024

Noted political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson he steps out of his role as a commentator on political and social issues and in A Yogi’s Guide to Body Pride at Any Age, he takes a hard look at the flash point controversies within the yoga, health, wellness, and even body building worlds. He takes us on a journey from his overcoming health, weight and body image challenges to his embrace of body pride and wellness.

But he does more in this new and dynamic book. He explores the issues of gender, race, religion, the social and cultural biases toward aging and physical exercise in relation to older men and women. These issues have been the subject of fierce debate.

One issue in particular that has been especially prickly and garnered much attention in recent years has been the issue of body shaming especially in relation to seniors. A Yogi’s Guide to Body Pride at Any Age weighs in heavily on the side of those who say no to body shaming, and yes to body pride for seniors.

Why Black Lives Do Matter probes deeply how racial typecasting continues to fuel the widespread public belief that Blacks are victimizers and not victims. This has stifled public debate and enabled political inaction, if not outright resistance, to meaningful solutions to the problem of racial victimization in American society. He observes that this too has deadly consequences: "That could easily translate into more deadly encounters with officers driven by the fear that any and every young Black in any and every street or vehicle stop poses a danger to officers. This is when the stock racial stereotypes of young Blacks as violent threats could kick in and engender a potentially bad outcome."

The devaluation of Black lives has truly been a chronic, painful, and all-consuming American dilemma that screams for an end. In his small way Hutchinson, aims that, Why Black Lives Do Matter attempts to further that aim.

Fifty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in his new book, 50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts (Middle Passage Press), March 2018, takes an in-depth look at the lingering doubts and disbelief about the official version of the murder of Dr. King and how that shaped events of the next fifty years.

Hutchinson presents14 pages of FBI memos, files, notes, minutes of meetings, and letters from the final report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations in 1976 that have rarely been fully presented and cited in their entirety. It’s entitled, "The FBI Plans Its Campaign to Discredit Dr. King." This includes the FBI’s 21 proposals to obliterate King as an African-American leader. The materials are the FBI’s own words detailing the full scope of its plan to destroy King. Many of the details in the campaign have never been presented in complete detail for the general public—the break ins, forgeries, SCLC plants, inspection of IRS tax filings, bank account seizures, poison pen letters, instigating police raids on King’s hotel and motel rooms, calls to universities, congresspersons to discredit him, and even the Nobel Prize Committee to reject King. Hutchinson details how the FBI stopped at nothing in its relentless, ruthless, no-holds barred campaign to destroy King even considering trying to turn his wife, Coretta Scott King, into an informer against him.

Hutchinson notes, "There was a clear method to the FBI’s diabolical obsession with King. It understood the monumental affect the King led movement had on civil rights, politics, heightened awareness of poverty, his crucial relationship with Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the influence he had on other change movements globally and in America, that of Hispanics, Women, and Gays. Hutchinson poses and tackles the poignant question King raised, "Where Do We Go from Here."

50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts draws from King’s writings, letters, declassified government files, and documents and essays that focus on King’s murder and the half century of change after King’s murder. This includes an assessment of " King Versus Trump" and "What if King Had Lived?"

A Skeptic’s Journey through the Yoga Experience takes a hard and personal look by one who once held deep skepticism about yoga at the history, the myths, the controversies, the practice, the philosophy, the growth, commercialism of, and impact of yoga. The book examines the racial and gender conceptions and controversies that confront yoga, as well as the controversy and debate over the physical hazards of yoga to men especially.

A Skeptic’s Journey through the Yoga Experience is a small primer that aims to give a skeptic’s impressions of some of the hot button issues and controversies in the yoga world-gender, race, physical hazards, men, and women, commercialism, and the future. It in no way pretends to be a comprehensive and definitive study of yoga. The author intersperses throughout the book the three years of notes in his journal that gives his reflections, insights, feelings, and thoughts about the various poses, movements, and mental and physical changes and benefits of yoga.

In the three-year period from 2015 to 2017, I covered and analyzed every aspect of the speeches, utterances, and positions Trump posited during his presidential campaign on civil rights, voting rights, criminal justice and police abuse, and education in my featured columns in the Huffington Post. My special emphasis was on the impact a Trump candidacy and presidency would have on race relations and African-Americans. The Trump Challenge to Black America is based on those columns. I have expanded those columns with added material, fresh assessments, and a detailed look at the direction Trump has taken the country in since his election. The conclusion is the same as in my columns. Trump poses the greatest challenge and peril of any president in modern times to black Americans. The Trump Challenge is a hard hitting laser look at that peril and what black Americans can do about it.

Groundbreaking Book Explores the Black Impact on Classical Music Earl Ofari Hutchinson meticulously details in his It’s Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music the black impact on classical music. Hutchinson notes that there are numerous books which have dissected and re-dissected every possible aspect of classical music-the composers, performers, their compositions, the musical structure, the history, and even the gossip and minutiae about the composers and performers. Yet, there are almost no books that focus on the significant part that black composers and performers played in influencing and in turn being influenced by classical music "The list of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-European composers, conductors, instrumental performers, and singers," says Hutchinson, "is and always has been, rich, varied, and deep. Sadly, the recognition of this has almost always come in relation to the work of a major European or white American composer."

Hutchinson’s aim in It’s Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music is not to update a book on blacks and classical music, or list the many notable individual breakthroughs of top flight black classical music performers and composers through the years. Instead he tells the story of how blacks have actually influenced the development, history and structure of classical music in its major varied forms; opera, chamber pieces, symphonies, and concertos. It’s a story that’s filled with tragedy and triumph, heart break and heroism.

Hutchinson gives an exciting and entertaining glimpse into Mozart’s "borrowing" a musical idea from the black violin virtuoso Chevalier Saint-Georges in the eighteenth century, Dvorak’s basing a major part of his New World Symphony on Negro Spirituals in the nineteenth century, and composers such as Gershwin, Copeland. Stravinsky and Ravel, wildly embracing jazz and blues in some of their popular and acclaimed works in the twentieth century. It’s Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music is a fast paced, reader friendly, easy to understand look at just exactly what and how the greats in classical music have borrowed from and paid homage to jazz, blues, ragtime, boogie woogie and Negro spirituals. "Throughout I name and recommend many pieces to listen to by the greats of classical music," notes Hutchinson, "who were directly inspired by black musical forms as well as the works of black composers who have written exceptional works that have influenced the works of other classical composers."

Hutchinson also tells how black performers such as Roland Hayes with his unique interpretations of German leider, and Marian Anderson and Jessye Norman with their distinctive tones and vibrant, fresh renderings of, and subsequent path breaking performances in the major works of opera giants, Giuseppi Verdi and Richard Wagner have greatly altered how these master’s works are heard today.

It’s Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music, takes the reader on an exciting, eye opening, and revealing journey through the world of classical music in which the major critics, composers and performers tell in their words their appreciation of the major contribution blacks made to classical music. "It is no exaggeration or overstatement to say that classical music does owe a debt to the black experience in classical music," says Hutchinson, "And the goal is to show music lovers and readers how that debt continues to be paid in concert halls everywhere."

Political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson is best known as an African-American commentator on politics, race and social issues. Yet, for decades he has inhabited another world that seemingly is as far removed from the day’s political and social conflicts that he specializes in discussing and writing about as the sun and the moon. It’s the world of Western Classical Music. He has long had an enduring love and passion for the music and has written and commented about it on his radio shows and in his columns. Now, in his book, Beethoven and Me: A Beginner’s Guide to Classical Music, Hutchinson breaks through a hard barrier that has long separated politics and social commentary from music, in this case classical music. He shares his many personal experiences in concert halls and his observations about the world of classical music.

Beethoven and Me: A Beginner’s Guide to Classical Music is a fast paced, easy to understand survey of the music’s well-known and not so well-known composers, their music and their struggles for recognition. He brings a fresh and his very personal perspective in discussing them and their music. Hutchinson makes it easy for the reader by deliberately minimizing using technical terms and language. Throughout the book, he provides the reader with a highly personal running commentary of his experiences in front of and behind the orchestra stage during two decades of active listening and commenting on classical music. Along the way, he details the influence and struggles of African-American, Hispanic and women composers in the classical music world who more often than not have been shamefully neglected or marginalized in the classical music tradition.

Beethoven and Me: A Beginner’s Guide to Classical Music is Hutchinson’s personal, and very selective, impressionistic walk through the history, tradition and experience of classical music. It’s a primer written for a very beginning listener. Hutchinson has boldly stepped out of his role as a political and social commentator to show that music and the compelling social issues of the day need not be separate.

From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History conveys the exhilaration the author feels at having walked in the shadow of history of a Dr. King, a Miles Davis, a John Lennon, a Bob Marley, and many others. Hutchinson’s mission is to make the reader feel the exhilaration he felt meeting, talking with, interviewing and personally engaging with as a journalist, broadcaster, and activist the people whose monumental accomplishments affected the lives of millions over a half century from the mid-1960s to the first decade of the 21st Century.