African American
Showing 1–32 of 42 results
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If We Don’t Get It
A People’s History of Ferguson$29.99At a time of renewed activism, the story of the young people who bravely turned a local issue into a national movement for justice, from a professor of Black studies at Amherst who participated in the Ferguson uprising
Stefan M. Bradley was a young professor in Saint Louis University when Black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a local white police officer. Bradley quickly became a key media activist during the protests that ensued, giving on-the-ground interviews to Chris Hayes, CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and others.
In If We Don’t Get It, Bradley, now a named professor of Black studies at Amherst College, shows how Brown’s murder sparked a grassroots movement for democracy, led by Black youth, which transformed the way we talk about race, justice, and policing in the United States.
Bradley conducted over two dozen oral history interviews with young Black protesters. Through the authentic voices of the movement’s participants, Bradley describes the motivation and tensions coursing through the uprising’s early days and weeks, the problems of media representation (and misrepresentation), intergenerational conflict over protest tactics, clashes with the police and politicians, and much more. If We Don’t Get It also explores the new generation of elected officials, including Congresswoman Cori Bush, who emerged from the local movement’s ranks.
A rich story with deep relevance for the protests of our own time, If We Don’t Get It offers a gripping account of how young activists, without previous political experience, succeeded in changing our national political narrative. -
King of the North
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South$22.99 – $30.99A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book
From the New York Times bestselling author, a radical reframing of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.
In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.
King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.
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A Plausible Man
The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin$28.99
The remarkable story of the man behind the book that helped spark the Civil War, in a stunning historical detective story
“I love this research.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr., at a Hutchins Center presentation of Susanna Ashton’s findingsIn December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.
A Plausible Man unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jackson’s remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacy—where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.
In the spirit of Tiya Miles’s prizewinning All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught, Susanna Ashton breathes life into a striving and nuanced American character, one unmistakably rooted in the vast sweep of nineteenth-century America. -
Blackbirds Singing
Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches from the Civil War to the Twenty-first Century$25.99 – $27.99An uplifting collection of speeches by Black women, curated by the civil and human rights activist, scholar, and author
When Mary Ann Shadd Cary—the first Black woman publisher in North America—declared, “break every yoke . . . let the oppressed go free” to congregants in Chatham, Canada, in 1858, she joined a tradition of African American women speaking for their own liberation. Drawing from a rich archive of political speeches, acclaimed activist and author Janet Dewart Bell, the author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, explores this tradition in Blackbirds Singing.
Gathering an array of recognized names as well as new discoveries, Bell curates two centuries of stirring public addresses by Black women, from Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker to Barbara Lee and Barbara Jordan. These magnificent speakers explore ethics, morality, courage, authenticity, and leadership, highlighting Black women speaking truth to power in service of freedom and justice.With an expansive historical lens, Blackbirds Singing celebrates the tradition of Black women’s political speech and labor, allowing the voices and powerful visions of African American women to speak across generations building power for the world.
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Paul Robeson
No One Can Silence Me: The Life of the Legendary Artist and Activist (Adapted for Young Adults)$17.99 – $28.99Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Paul Robeson’s death, a young adult version of his life, based on the biography USA Today called “magnificent”
“A history of a global luminary figure that serves as a reminder of the courageous freedom-fighting work in front of us.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Adapted from Martin Duberman’s “superb” (New York Times) biography of Paul Robeson, and featuring an introduction by award-winning young adult author Jason Reynolds, along with explanations of key terms and photographs from Robeson’s life, this is a thrilling addition to the young adult canon.Paul Robeson was destined for greatness. The son of an ex-slave who upon his college graduation ranked first in his class, Robeson was proclaimed the future “leader of the colored race in America.” Although a graduate of Columbia Law School, he abandoned his law career (and the racism he encountered there) and began a hugely successful career as an internationally celebrated actor and singer. Robeson’s triumphs on the stage earned him esteem among white and Black Americans across the country, although his daring and principled activism eventually made him an outcast from the entertainment industry, and his radical views made many consider him a public enemy.
Paul Robeson: No One Can Silence Me is an introduction for readers in middle and high school to the inspiring and complicated life of one of America’s most fascinating figures, whose story of artistry, heroism, conviction, and conflict is newly relevant today.
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Denmark Vesey’s Garden
Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy$19.99 – $28.99One of Janet Maslin’s Favorite Books of 2018, The New York Times
One of John Warner’s Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago Tribune
Named one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor
“A fascinating and important new historical study.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.”
—Civil War Times
The stunning, groundbreaking account of “the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin” (Providence Journal)Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.
As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, “Kytle and Roberts’s combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston’s history and empathy with its inhabitants’ past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called “a stunning contribution, ” Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.
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Free All Along
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews$26.99Featured in the New Yorker‘s “Page-Turner”
One of Mashable’s “17 books every activist should read in 2019”
“This is an expression not of people who are suddenly freed of something, but people who have been free all along.” —Ralph Ellison, speaking with Robert Penn Warren
A stunning collection of previously unpublished interviews with key figures of the black freedom struggle by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author
In 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the black freedom struggle. He spoke at length with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins, eliciting reflections and frank assessments of race in America and the possibilities for meaningful change. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.
A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. Astonishingly, the full extent of the interviews remained in the background and were never published. The audiotapes stayed largely unknown until recent years. Free All Along brings to life the vital historic voices of America’s civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals.
A major contribution to our understanding of the struggle for justice and equality, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents that have pressing relevance today.
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Chokehold
Policing Black Men$17.99 – $28.99Finalist for the 2018 National Council on Crime & Delinquency’s Media for a Just Society Awards
Nominated for the 49th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)
A 2017 Washington Post Notable Book
A Kirkus Best Book of 2017
“Butler has hit his stride. This is a meditation, a sonnet, a legal brief, a poetry slam and a dissertation that represents the full bloom of his early thesis: The justice system does not work for blacks, particularly black men.”
—The Washington Post“The most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow . . . .”
—The New York Times Book Review“Powerful . . . deeply informed from a legal standpoint and yet in some ways still highly personal”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)With the eloquence of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the persuasive research of Michelle Alexander, a former federal prosecutor explains how the system really works, and how to disrupt it
Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread—all with the support of judges and politicians.
In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer—without relying as much on police.
Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler’s controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it’s better for a black man to plead guilty—even if he’s innocent—are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations.
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Lighting the Fires of Freedom
African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement$17.99 – $25.99Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
Recommended by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Book Riot and AutostraddleNominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, a groundbreaking collection of profiles of African American women leaders in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights
During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. Beyond Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, most Americans would be hard-pressed to name other leaders at the community, local, and national levels.
In Lighting the Fires of Freedom Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women’s all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that are vital and relevant today.
A vital document for understanding the Civil Rights Movement, Lighting the Fires of Freedom is an enduring testament to the vitality of women’s leadership during one of the most dramatic periods of American history.
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A Perilous Path
Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law$14.99 – $15.99A frank and enlightening discussion on race and the law in America today, from some of our leading legal minds—including the bestselling author of Just Mercy
This blisteringly candid discussion of the American racial dilemma in the age of Black Lives Matter brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear.
Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these titans of the legal profession discuss the importance of working for justice in an unjust time.
Covering topics as varied as “the commonality of pain,” “when ‘public’ became a dirty word,” and the concept of an “equality dividend” that is due to people of color for helping America brand itself internationally as a country of diversity and acceptance, Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, and Anthony C. Thompson engage in a deeply thought-provoking discussion on the law’s role in both creating and solving our most pressing racial quandaries. A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America’s perpetual fault line.
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Brown Is the New White
How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority$18.99 – $25.95The New York Times and Washington Post bestseller that sparked a national conversation about America’s new progressive, multiracial majority, updated to include data from the 2016 election
With a new preface and afterword by the author
When it first appeared in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Brown Is the New White helped spark a national discussion of race and electoral politics and the often-misdirected spending priorities of the Democratic party. This “slim yet jam-packed call to action” (Booklist) contained a “detailed, data-driven illustration of the rapidly increasing number of racial minorities in America” (NBC News) and their significance in shaping our political future.
Completely revised and updated to address the aftermath of the 2016 election, this first paperback edition of Brown Is the New White doubles down on its original insights. Attacking the “myth of the white swing voter” head-on, Steve Phillips, named one of “America’s Top 50 Influencers” by Campaigns & Elections, closely examines 2016 election results against a long backdrop of shifts in the electoral map over the past generation—arguing that, now more than ever, hope for a more progressive political future lies not with increased advertising to middle-of-the-road white voters, but with cultivating America’s growing, diverse majority.
Emerging as a respected and clear-headed commentator on American politics at a time of pessimism and confusion among Democrats, Phillips offers a stirring answer to anyone who thinks the immediate future holds nothing but Trump and Republican majorities.
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The Dawn of Detroit
A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits$18.99 – $27.95Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the American Book Award
Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award
Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize
Winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction)Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize
Finalist for the Cundill History PrizeA New York Times Editor’s Choice selection
“If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.”
—New York Times Book Review“[Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.”
—Washington Post“[Tiya Miles] is among the best when it comes to blending artful storytelling with an unwavering sense of social justice.”
—Martha S. Jones in The Chronicle of Higher Education“A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.”
—Publisher Weekly (starred)“A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.”
—Kirkus ReviewsFrom the MacArthur genius grant winner, a beautifully written and revelatory look at the slave origins of a major northern American city
Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city: Detroit.
In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.
A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery’s American legacy.
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Black Power 50
$24.95Black Power burst onto the world scene in 1966 with ideas, politics, and fashion that opened the eyes of millions of people across the globe. In the United States, the movement spread like wildfire: high school and college youth organized black student unions; educators created black studies programs; Black Power conventions gathered thousands of people from all walks of life; and books, journals, bookstores, and publishing companies spread Black Power messages and imagery throughout the country and abroad.
The Black Arts Movement inspired the creation of some eight hundred black theaters and cultural centers, where a generation of writers and artists forged a new and enduring cultural vision.
Black Power 50 includes original interviews with key figures from the movement, essays from today’s leading Black Power scholars, and over one hundred stunning images, offering a beautiful and compelling introduction to this pivotal movement.
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Pushout
The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools$18.95 – $49.00The “powerful” (Michelle Alexander) exploration of the harsh and harmful experiences confronting Black girls in schools, and how we can instead orient schools toward their flourishing
On the day fifteen-year-old Diamond from the Bay Area stopped going to school, she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school.
In a work that Lisa Delpit calls “imperative reading,” Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose complex lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Painting “a chilling picture of the plight of black girls and women today” (The Atlantic), Morris exposes a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.
At a moment when Black girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system, Pushout is truly a book “for everyone who cares about children” (Washington Post).
Book cover photograph by Brittsense/brittsense.com.
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Remembering Jim Crow
African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South$19.95 – $20.99A timely paperback reissue of the stunning, prize-winning portrait of the Jim Crow South through unique first-person accounts
Praised as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly), this remarkable work of oral history captures the searing experience of the Jim Crow years through first-person interviews carefully collected by researchers at Duke University’s Behind the Veil project. Newly relevant today as Americans reckon with the legacies of slavery and strive for racial equality, Remembering Jim Crow provides vivid, compelling accounts by men and women from all walks of life, who tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression.
“A shivering dose of reality and inspiring stories of everyday resistance” (Library Journal), Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how Black Southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. Collectively, these narratives illuminate individual and community survival and tell a powerful story of the American past that is crucial for us to remember as we grapple with Jim Crow’s legacies in the present.
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Black Stats
African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-first Century$14.95 – $49.00An essential handbook of eye-opening—and frequently myth-busting—facts and figures about the real lives of Black Americans today
There’s no defeating white supremacist myths without data—real data. Black Stats is a compact and useful guide that offers up-to-date figures on Black life in the United States today, avoiding jargon and assumptions and providing critical analyses and information.
Monique Couvson, author of the acclaimed Pushout, has compiled statistics from a broad spectrum of telling categories that illustrate the quality of life and the possibility of (and barriers to) advancement for a group at the heart of American society. With fascinating information on everything from disease trends, incarceration rates, and lending practices to voting habits, green jobs, and educational achievement, the material in this book will enrich and inform a range of public debates while challenging commonly held yet often misguided perceptions.
Black Stats simultaneously highlights measures of incredible progress, conveys the disparate impacts of social policies and practices, and surprises with revelations that span subjects including the entertainment industry, military service, and marriage trends. An essential tool for advocates, educators, and anyone seeking racial justice, Black Stats is an affordable guidebook for anyone seeking to understand the complex state of our nation.
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12 Angry Men
True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today$16.95 – $24.95“Beautifully written, painfully honest” first-person accounts of racial profiling, as experienced by a dozen black men from all over America (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow).
In an era of contentious debate about controversial police practices and, more broadly, the significance of implications of race throughout American life, 12 Angry Men is an urgent, moving, and timely book that exposes “a serious impediment to the collective American Dream of a colorblind society” (Pittsburgh Urban Media).
In this “extraordinarily compelling” book, a dozen eloquent authors tell their own personal stories of being racially profiled. From a Harvard law school student tackled by a security guard on the streets of Manhattan, a federal prosecutor detained while walking in his own neighborhood in Washington, DC, and a high school student in Colorado arrested for “loitering” in the subway station as he waits for the train home, to a bike rider in Austin, Texas, a professor at a Big Ten university in Iowa, and the head of the ACLU’s racial profiling initiative (who was pursued by national guardsmen after arriving on the red-eye in Boston’s Logan airport), here are true stories of law-abiding Americans who also happen to be black men (Publishers Weekly).
Cumulatively, the effect is staggering, and will open the eyes of anyone who thinks we live in a “post-racial” or “colorblind” America.
“Powerful.” —Jet
“This is raw testimony intended to vividly capture the invasions of privacy and the assaults on dignity that always accompany unreasonable government intrusion.” —Kirkus Reviews -
1877
America's Year of Living Violently1877 was the year many Americans wanted to forget. In the messy aftermath of the Civil War, economic depression, white supremacy, labor unrest, and a factionalized political system produced a period of unprecedented violence and upheaval in American life. This “solid, deeply informed history” (Publishers Weekly) brilliantly recaptures this tumultuous time, revealing that the fires of that pivotal year also fueled a hothouse of cultural and intellectual innovation. Best of all, historian Michael A. Bellesiles tells the story of 1877 not just through dramatic events, but also through the lives of famous and little-known Americans alike: Mark Twain, Crazy Horse, Susan B. Anthony; the detective Allan Pinkerton and President Rutherford B.Hayes; the black poet Albery Allson Whitman and the pioneer in women’s health issues Mary Putman Jacobi; Ida B. Wells; and Billy the kid. 1877‘s account of America at the dawn of its modern era will forever alter our understanding of the forces that shape our politics, our culture, and our national identity.
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Lift Every Voice
The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement$26.00 – $29.95An epic narrative of the struggle against injustice, hailed as “the definitive history of the NAACP” by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A “civil rights Hall of Fame” (Kirkus) that was published to remarkable praise in conjunction with the NAACP’s Centennial Celebration, Lift Every Voice is a momentous history of the struggle for civil rights told through the stories of men and women who fought inescapable racial barriers in the North as well as the South—keeping the promise of democracy alive from the earliest days of the twentieth century to the triumphs of the 1950s and 1960s.
Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP’s activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. In the critical postwar era, following a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow.
A sweeping and dramatic story woven deep into the fabric of American history—”history that helped shape America’s consciousness, if not its soul” (Booklist)—Lift Every Voice offers a timeless lesson on how people, without access to the traditional levers of power, can create change under seemingly impossible odds.
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Remembering Slavery
African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation$20.99 – $49.95The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed
“As vital and necessary a historical document as anyone has ever produced in this country.” —The Boston Globe
With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again.
No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America.
Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice).
With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.
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Harlem on My Mind
Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968$24.95Long before Harlem became one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the red-hot real estate market of Manhattan, it was a metaphor for African American culture at its richest. Allon Schoener’s celebrated Harlem on My Mind is the classic record of Harlem life during some of the most exciting and turbulent years of its history, a beautiful—and poignant—reminder of a powerful moment in African America history.
Including the work of some of Harlem’s most treasured photographers, among them James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks, there are photographs of Harlem’s literary lights—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Richard Wright; its politicians—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and its musicians—Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. The book also includes the photographs of the everyday folk who gave life to this legendary community.
These extraordinary images are juxtaposed with articles from publications such as the New York Times and the Amsterdam News, which have helped to record the life of one of New York’s most memorialized neighborhoods.
Originally published in 1969 as the catalogue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s controversial exhibition of the same name, Harlem on My Mind is as compelling today as it was when first published.
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Black Radical
The Education of an American Revolutionary$24.95Black Fire, the celebrated first volume of Nelson Peery’s riveting autobiography, told the story of his childhood and teenage years during the Depression and his subsequent political awakening as a soldier in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division in World War II.
In this electrifying sequel, Peery picks up where Black Fire ends, beginning with his integration back into civilian life following the war, and describing the development of his revolutionary consciousness as he attempts to move from first-class soldier to first-class civilian. Black Radical offers a rare perspective and a new and fascinating vantage on the crucial historical period from 1946 through 1968, including the postwar grassroots struggle for equality and democracy led by black veterans, the battles of the black left and revolutionaries during the McCarthy inquisition and their role in the freedom movement, and the 1965 Watts rebellion in Los Angeles, where Peery and his family were living at the time. Above all, Black Radical is about the education of an American revolutionary amid the continuing struggles to bring to life the ideals that Peery and so many others fought for in World War II.
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Free at Last
A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War$34.99A handsome new edition of an essential work by the groundbreaking historian of African American life in the nineteenth century
Free at Last brings together some of the most remarkable correspondence ever written by Americans. These letters, personal testimonies, official transcripts, and other records convey the struggle of black men and women to overthrow the slave system, to aid the Union cause, and to give meaning to their newly won freedom in a war-torn nation. Drawn from the landmark reference volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, this “work of deep significance for all Americans” (The Washington Post Book World ) offers a unique way of understanding emancipation.
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Say It Plain
A Century of Great African American Speeches$16.99 – $34.95A moving portrait of how black Americans have spoken out against injustice—with speeches by Thurgood Marshall, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, and more.
In “full-throated public oratory, the kind that can stir the soul”, this unique anthology collects the transcribed speeches of the twentieth century’s leading African American cultural, literary, and political figures, many never before available in printed form (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
From an 1895 speech by Booker T. Washington to Julian Bond’s sharp assessment of school segregation on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board in 2004, the collection captures a powerful tradition of oratory—by political activists, civil rights organizers, celebrities, and religious leaders—going back more than a century.
Including the text of each speech with an introduction placing it in historical context, Say It Plain is a remarkable record—from the back-to-Africa movement to the civil rights era and the rise of black nationalism and beyond—conveying a struggle for freedom and a challenge to America to live up to its democratic principles.
Includes speeches by:- Mary McLeod Bethune
- Julian Bond
- Stokely Carmichael
- Shirley Chisholm
- Louis Farrakhan
- Marcus Garvey
- Jesse Jackson
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Thurgood Marshall
- Booker T. Washington
- Walter White
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After the Storm
Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina$22.95Available for the first time in paperback after selling out its hardcover print run and being frequently named among the best of the Katrina books, After the Storm offers “angry, learned, focused, readable, [and] essential” writing, according to Library Journal, in which contributors face what Ebony magazine calls “questions about poverty, housing, governmental decision-making, crime, community development and political participation, which were raised in the aftermath of the storm.”
Featuring the work of leading African American intellectuals, including Derrick Bell, Charles Ogletree, Michael Eric Dyson, Cheryl Harris, Devon Carbado, Adolph Reed, Sheryll Cashin, and Clement Alexander Price, After the Storm suggests “precisely what we must do if we are to both save the planet and create the great towns and cities that we can proudly bequeath to future generations” (Socialist Review).
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She Would Not Be Moved
How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott$16.00 – $22.95The prizewinning educator’s brilliant and timely meditation on the misleading ways in which we teach the story of Rosa Parks
Published in hardcover in the fall of 2005 shortly before Rosa Parks died, She Would Not Be Moved is a timely and important exploration of how the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott has been distorted when taught in schools. Hailed by the New York Times Book Review when it was first published as having “the transcendent power that allows us to see . . . alternate ways of viewing our history and understanding what is going on in our classrooms,” this expanded version of Kohl’s original groundbreaking discussion “deftly catalogs problems with the prevailing presentations of Parks and offers [a] more historically accurate, politically pointed and age-appropriate alternative” (Chicago Tribune).
In addition to Marian Wright Edelman’s introduction, She Would Not Be Moved includes an original essay by Cynthia Brown on civil rights activists Septima Clark, Virginia Durr, and Rosa Parks; a teachers’ resource guide to educational materials about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement; and an appendix explaining how to evaluate textbooks for young people about this critical period in U.S. history.
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A Matter Of Law
$17.95 – $24.95 -
Bronzeville
Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943$39.95In the 1940s, the federal government sent a group of gifted photographers across the United States to record and publicize conditions in cities, towns, and rural areas that were the destination of an unprecedented migration. Two of these photographers, Russell Lee and Edwin Rosskam, spent time on Chicago’s South Side, eventually producing over a thousand documentary images of Bronzeville’s life. This remarkable coverage of a black urban community—the only significant collection of photographs of black Chicago during this pivotal era—has largely gone unpublished until now.
In over 100 handsome full-page black-and-white photographs of bustling city streets and sidewalks, prosperous middle-class businesses, thriving cabarets, as well as dirt-poor migrants from the deep South, this stunning tribute captures the vitality of a city whose burgeoning black population produced a vibrant and sophisticated culture now familiar worldwide. With original essays on the migration and the photography project, and contemporary commentary by Richard Wright and others, Bronzeville is a unique and exceptionally beautiful evocation of one of the defining moments in American cultural history.
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White
The Biography of Walter White, Mr. Naacp$29.95From his earliest years, Walter White was determined to transcend the rigid boundaries of segregation-era America. An African American of exceptionally light complexion, White went undercover as a young man to expose the depredations of Southern lynch mobs. As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 until his death in 1955, White was among the nation’s preeminent champions of civil rights, leading influential national campaigns against lynching, segregation in the military, and racism in Hollywood movies.
White is portrayed here for the first time in his full complexity, a man whose physical appearance enabled him to negotiate two very different worlds in segregated America, yet who saw himself above all as an organization man, “Mr. NAACP.” Deeply researched and richly documented, White’s biography provides a revealing vantage point from which to view the leading political and cultural figures of his time—including W.E.B. Du Bois, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Weldon Johnson—and an unrivaled glimpse into the contentious world of civil rights politics and activism in the pre–civil rights era.
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A Different Shade of Gray
$19.95 – $26.95 -
The Land Where the Blues Began
$35.99Winner of a National Book Critics Circle award, a rollicking and unforgettable memoir by the man who helped bring the music of the blues into the mainstream
“Without Lomax it’s possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground.” —Brian Eno
A self-described “song-hunter,” the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and ’40s, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta’s music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred MacDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him.
The Land Where the Blues Began is both a fascinating recollection of a pivotal time in American music history and an intimate portrait of the struggles blues musicians faced in the Jim Crow South. The blues were an organic expression of Black humanity in a place where slavery had been outlawed but where segregation, violence, and racial inequality were still the law of the land. Lomax’s role as a liaison to white America, relating the emotion and musical virtuosity displayed by those musicians, would change American popular music forever. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax’s “discerning reconstructions . . . give life to a domain most of us can never know . . . one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread” (The New York Times Book Review).
Artistic expression has always been a way for oppressed peoples to speak truth to power, assert their dignity, and simply live in a world rife with injustice. The Land Where the Blues Began is an enthralling chronicle of the journey to bring this irrepressible art out of the Delta where it began and into the ears of every American.
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Dangerous Liaisons
Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality$22.95A groundbreaking study of the intersections of race and sexuality, by an all-star group of writers. From Selma and Stonewall to California’s Proposition 209 and the Defense of Marriage Act, blacks and gays continue to face resistance. Conservatives often lump these two groups together by arguing that both are demanding not equal rights, but “special” rights. In fact, gay rights activists have drawn parallels between their own struggles and the civil rights movement. Yet others have balked at any comparison, and conflict between the minorities has recently arisen. In an unprecedented undertaking, Dangerous Liaisons provides a platform for the leading minds of both communities, including those who straddle both worlds, to debate the volatile subject of the relationship between African Americans and homosexuals. In eleven newly commissioned pieces together with five classic essays, Dangerous Liaisons addresses such timely issues as attitudes toward gay marriage versus attitudes toward interracial marriage; the growth of gay and lesbian rights organizations and homophobia in the black church; and conflict among minorities in the arts. Dangerous Liaisons presents well-known historians, political analysts, activists, artists, writers, and philosophers on minority relations in the struggle for legal, social, and cultural equality.
Contributors: Michael Bronski, George Chauncey, Cheryl Clark, Cathy Cohen, Gary Comstock, Samuel Delany, Martin Duberman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jewelle Gomez, Pillip Brian Harper, Audre Lorde, Robert Reid-Pharr, Darieck Scott, Barbara Smith, Alisa Solomon, Cornel West
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