The BAR - Brothers Also Read

The BAR Member Meeting
2024-09-21 13:30 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | The LOVE Building, 4731 Grand River Ave, Detroit, MI, 48208, United States
The Other Life of Abraham Lincoln’s Barber is a biographical narrative of that tells the story of Solomon “Sweet” Johnson, an Underground Railroad conductor and Civil War Soldier who serves as a White House presidential guard and barber to President Lincoln before going on to a long career of public service with the US federal government and a leadership position in US black Masonry.
Set against the backdrop of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, it describes how young Solomon’s heroic rescue of three kidnapped black boys in Columbus, Ohio lead him into the military and ultimately to service as a White House presidential guard. A trained barber, when the president’s personal barber dies unexpectedly, Solomon is called on to fill the opening while continuing as a presidential guard.
Sensitive war-time conversations between Lincoln and his cabinet members overheard by Solomon as he shaves and cuts the president’s hair shape the young guard’s views on public service and the nation’s continuing failure to live out the fundamental principle of its Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. The relationship he forms with the beleaguered war-time leader results in Solomon’s appointment as a Treasury Department clerk, the first black office worker in the history of the US government.
Energized by his trailblazing new responsibilities, and deeply troubled by the president’s assassination, Solomon leverages his government worker status and his Masonic leadership position in the battle to preserve the gains of Reconstruction in a nation rapidly sliding back into white supremacy after the death of the Great Emancipator.

The BAR Member Meeting
2024-07-20 13:30 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | The LOVE Building, 4731 Grand River Ave, Detroit, MI, 48208, United States
Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.
Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book.” But as violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.
So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

The BAR Member Meeting
2024-05-18 12:00 - 15:00 UTC | The University of Michigan Detroit Center (UMDC), 3663 Woodward Ave, Detroit, 48201, United States
As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”
And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to?
Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misconception.
The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.

The BAR Member Meeting
2024-03-16 12:00 - 15:00, 2024-01-20 12:00 - 15:00 UTC | The University of Michigan Detroit Center (UMDC), 3663 Woodward Ave, Detroit, 48201, United States

The BAR Member Meeting
2023-11-18 12:00 - 15:00, 2023-09-16 12:00 - 15:00, 2023-07-15 12:00 - 15:00, 2023-05-20 12:00 - 15:00, 2023-03-18 12:00 - 15:00, 2022-11-19 12:00 - 15:00, 2022-09-17 12:00 - 15:00, 2022-07-16 12:00 - 15:00 UTC | MI

Meeting #1
2022-07-12 13:00 - 15:00 UTC | MI
