Download or read book Conversations with Maida Springer written by Yevette Richards and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2004 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harlem in the early 1920s was humming with cultural and political energy. Marcus Garvey was proclaiming the rights of African Americans as the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and leading boycotts against local businesses in his "don't buy where you can't work" campaign. Radical orators shouted from soapboxes on the street, dynamic black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were asserting in print the struggle for racial equality, and the progressive literary groundswell known as the Harlem Renaissance was just getting started. Maida Springer was a child stuffing leaflets for her best friend's father, a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and listening in awe to the stirring rhetoric all around her.