An account of the experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service describes how medical treatment was withheld from Black sharecroppers infected with syphilis.
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9780029166703
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Book
Dancing Spirit
By Jamison, Judith
Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering figure. Her commanding physical presence and extraordinary technique have made her not only a superstar of American dance and an innovator in her field, but also an inspiration to African Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Last November, Doubleday published Dancing Spirit, this remarkable woman's autobiography. Now, with Anchor's paperback publication, an even wider audience can trace the steps of her career: her early years in Philadelphia, where she began studying dance at the age of six, her discovery by Agnes de Mille; years of frustration and struggle in a field that favored petite, fair, White women; her legendary collaboration with Alvin Ailey; her work on Broadway in the musical Sophisticated Ladies ; the formation of her own company, the Jamison Project, and her retum to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as artistic director after its founder's death in 1989. Dancing Spirit contains vivid portraits of many artists Jamison has worked with including Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Jessye Norman, Geoffrey Holder, Carmen de Lavallade, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to name only a few. And Jamison talks frankly about the price exacted by a dancer's nomadic life--rootlessness, fleeting relationships, the obsession with physical beauty. Illustrated with sixty photographs, Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance.
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9780385425575
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Book
Philadelphia Fire
By Wideman, John Edgar
In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames.
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9780805012668
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Book
Defending the Spirit
By Robinson, Randall
The founder of TransAfrica--a lobby group for the interests of African and Caribbean peoples--recollects his childhood in the segregated South, his rise to power as a Washington statesman, and the racism he encountered both at home and abroad. 15,000 first printing.
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9780525944027
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Book
Before the Mayflower
By Bennett, Lerone
The black experience in America-- starting from its origins in western Africa up to the present day-- is examined in this seminal study from a prominent African American figure. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial period through the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The most recent scholarship on the geographic, social, economic, and cultural journeys of African Americans, together with vivid portraits of key black leaders, complete this comprehensive reference.
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9780874850291
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Book
Families and Freedom
By Berlin, Ira
Through the dramatic and moving letters and testimony of freed slaves, Families and Freedom tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the Civil War era. Former slaves, free blacks, and their contemporaries recount the elation accompanying the reunion of brothers and sisters separated for half a lifetime and the anguished realization that time lost could never be made up.
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9781565840263
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Book
Paradise
By Morrison, Toni
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present - in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.. "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins Toni Morrisons Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.. "A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate." - Los Angeles Times
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9780679433743
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Paperback
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boys discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwins rendering of his protagonists spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." "With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story." - The New York Times
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9780679601548
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Mass Market Paperback
Soldiers of Freedom
By Wright, Kai
Spanning from the American Revolution to the war in Afghanistan, this long-overdue, comprehensive history covers the full scope of African Americans' involvement in the armed forces during war and peacetime. Accompanying the informative text are 300 photographs and illustrations, most of them rare, some never before published. Highlights include accounts of: - The Rhode Island 1st Regiment, the first all-black regiment in the U.S. Army. - The New Orleans Battalion of Free Men of Color. - The Battle for Richmond, which resulted in the largest loss of black life in the Civil War. - The 1863 New York City Draft Riot. - The 1919 lynchings of black war vets. - The Navy's reluctant integration during World War II. - The dramatic story of the Tuskegee Airmen.
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9781579122539
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Book
Chains
By Anderson, Laurie Halse
If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl? As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom. From acclaimed author Laurie Halse Anderson comes this compelling, impeccably researched novel that shows the lengths we can go to cast off our chains, both physical and spiritual.
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9781416905851
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Hardcover
Death or Liberty
By Egerton, Douglas R
In Death or Liberty, Douglas R. Egerton offers a sweeping chronicle of African American history stretching from Britains 1763 victory in the Seven Years War to the election of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800. While American slavery is usually identified with antebellumcotton plantations, Egerton shows that on the eve of the Revolution it encompassed everything from wading in the South Carolina rice fields to carting goods around Manhattan to serving the households of Bostons elite. More important, he recaptures the drama of slaves, freed blacks, and whitereformers fighting to make the young nation fulfill its republican slogans. Although this struggle often unfolded in the corridors of power, Egerton pays special attention to what black Americans did for themselves in these decades, and his narrative brims with compelling portraits of forgottenAfrican American activists and rebels, who battled huge odds and succeeded in finding liberty--if never equality--only in northern states. Egerton concludes that despite the real possibility of peaceful, if gradual, emancipation, the Founders ultimately lacked the courage to end slavery.
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9780195306699
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Hardcover
The Making of African America
By Berlin, Ira
A leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuries Four great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. These epic migrations have made and remade African American life. Ira Berlin's magisterial new account of these passages evokes both the terrible price and the moving triumphs of a people forcibly and then willingly migrating to America.
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9780670021376
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Hardcover
Kansas City Lightning
By Crouch, Stanley
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America.Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four.Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City Lightning recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered.
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9780062005595
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Hardcover
Stokely
By Joseph, Peniel E
Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one humid Mississippi night in 1966. Carmichaels life changed that day, and so did Americas struggle for civil rights. "Black Power" became the slogan of an era, provoking a national reckoning on race and democracy. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, arguing that the young firebrands evolution from nonviolent activist to Black Power revolutionary reflected the trajectory of a generation radicalized by the violence and unrest of the late 1960s. Fed up with the slow progress of the civil rights movement, Carmichael urged Blacks to turn the rhetoric of freedom into a reality, inspiring countless African Americans to demand immediate political self-determination. A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision reshaped the struggle for African American equality.
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9780465013630
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Audiobook
Represent
By
This publication highlights nearly 150 objects in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that were created by American artists of African descent. Introduced with an essay by the distinguished scholar Richard J. Powell, the volume includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, costume and textiles, and photography by some 100 artists, from classically trained painters such as Henry Ossawa Tanner to self-taught artists such as Bill Traylor. Informative, thematic essays by the consulting curator, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, are followed by individual object entries as well as texts spotlighting areas of collecting strength, many of them written by members of the museum's curatorial staff. The first major publication to focus on the museum's diverse collection of works by African American artists, this volume also offers a fresh scholarly perspective on African American art from the early 19th century to the present.
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9780876332498
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Book
Giovanni's Room
By Baldwin, James
James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris.David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night - "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni's Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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9781101907740
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Print book
American Histories
By Wideman, John Edgar
In a new short story collection, John Edgar Wideman - the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life - explores subjects from the historical to the imagined, with a cast of fictional and real-life characters as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Jean Michael Basquiat, and his own family.John Edgar Wideman, lauded throughout his career, is a master at many forms. His latest offering, a collection of complex, charged stories, is a stunning marriage of the personal and historical. "JB & FD" re-imagines conversations between John Brown, the White antislavery crusader who famously raided Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist and orator. "Maps and Ledgers" examines a painful incident in the narrator's childhood and his relationship with his father. "Williamsburg Bridge" follows a man contemplating suicide. "My Dead" considers the narrator's departed brother and uncle. These stories are spellbinding narrative reflections on abolitionists and artists, fathers and sons, the bonds of family and the pull of memory. Wideman's fiction challenges the boundaries of the form. His stories operate on many levels, weaving together historical fact, imagined conversation, philosophical kernels, and deeply personal vignettes. As a whole, American Histories amounts to more than the sum of its parts, an extended meditation on family, history, and loss. This is Wideman at his best, most emotionally precise, and most intellectually stimulating.
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9781501178344
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Hardcover
Heart & Soul
By Merlis, Bob
Heart & Soul celebrates the nearly half-cent ury (1930-1975) of flamboyant and extravagant flowering in A frican-American culture that enriched the entire world. From the Jackson Five to the Four Tops, it was an era of audacio us showmen. '
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9781556705380
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Hardcover
Contact High
By Tobak, Vikki
An inside look at the work of hip-hop photographers told through their most intimate diaries - their contact sheets. Featuring rare outtakes from over 100 photoshoots alongside interviews and essays from industry legends, Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop takes readers on a chronological journey from old-school to alternative hip-hop and from analog to digital photography. The ultimate companion for music and photography enthusiasts, Contact High is the definitive history of hip-hop's early days, celebrating the artists that shaped the iconic album covers, t-shirts and posters beloved by hip-hop fans today. With essays from BILL ADLER, RHEA L. COMBS, FAB 5 FREDDY, MICHAEL GONZALES, YOUNG GURU, DJ PREMIER, and RZA
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9780525573883
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Hardcover
Paul Robeson
By Swindall, Lindsey R.
Paul Robeson: A Life of Activism and Art is the biography of an African American icon and a demonstration of historian Lindsey R. Swindall's knack for thorough, detailed research and reflection. Paul Robeson was, at points in his life, an actor, singer, football player, political activist and writer, one of the most diversely talented members of the Harlem Renaissance. Swindall centers Robeson's story around the argument that while Robeson leaned toward Socialism, a Pan-African perspective is fundamental to understanding his life as an artist and political advocate. Many previous works on Robeson have focused primarily on his involvement with the US Communist Party, paying little attention to the broader African influences on his politics and art. With each chapter focused on a decade of his life, this book affords us a fresh look at his story, and the ways in which the struggles, successes and studies of his formative years came to shape him as an artist, activist and man later on.
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9781442207936
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Book
Kobe Doin' Work
By Lee, Spike
An unprecedented inside look at a day in the life of this basketball superstar as he prepares for one of the biggest games of the season, from the locker room to being on the court.
Publisher: n/a
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786936798258
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DVD video
Daughters of the Dust
By Day, Cora
At the dawn of the 20th century, a multi-generational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina - former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors' Yoruba traditions - struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots. Cohen Media Group is proud to present the 25th anniversary restoration of director Julie Dash's landmark film "Daughters of the Dust." The first wide release by a black female filmmaker, "Daughters of the Dust" was met with wild critical acclaim and rapturous audience response when it initially opened in 1991. Casting a long legacy, "Daughters of the Dust" still resonates today, most recently as a major in influence on Beyoncé's video album "Lemonade.
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741952836896
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DVD
Bound to the Fire
By Deetz, Kelley Fanto
In grocery store aisles and kitchens across the country, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks can be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images are sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represent the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nations culinary and hospitality traditions even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.. Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon skills and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes such as oyster stew, gumbo, and fried fish. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations. . Focusing on enslaved cooks at Virginia plantations including Thomas Jeffersons Monticello and George Washingtons Mount Vernon, Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history. Bound to the Fire not only uncovers their rich and complex stories and illuminates their role in plantation culture, but it celebrates their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.
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9780813174730
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Hardcover
The cooking gene
By Twitty, Michael
"A memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces the paths of the author's ancestors (black and white) through the crucible of slavery to show its effects on our food today"--
Publisher: n/a
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9780062379276
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A Ballerinas Tale
By Copeland, Misty
Iconic ballerina Misty Copeland made history when she became the first African-American woman to be named principal dancer of the legendary American Ballet Theater. Get the incredible, behind-the-scenes story of how she overcame outmoded ballet culture stereotypes and near career-ending injuries to become one of the most revered dancers of her generation.
Publisher: n/a
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30306196794
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Blu-Ray
Killer of Sheep
By Burnett, Charles
An American masterpiece, independent to the bone. --Manohla Dargis, New York TimesThe finest film yet about African American life. --National Public RadioWay ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, KILLER OF SHEEP is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive... Here's to the miracle of a buried classic granted the opposite of a killing - here's to life. Grade: A.-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly --Acclaimed ReviewsThe finest film yet about African American life. - --National Public RadioWay ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, KILLER OF SHEEP is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive... Here's to the miracle of a buried classic granted the opposite of a killing - here's to life.
Publisher: n/a
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784148010748
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DVD
Learning Tree
By Parks, Gordon
"A fine novel."THE BOSTON HERALDPhotographer, writer, and composer, Gordon Parks has written a moving, true-to-life novel of growing up as a black man in this country in this century. Hailed by critics and readers alike, THE LEARNING TREE tells the extraordinary journey of a family as they struggle to understand the world around them and leave their mark a world that is better for their having been in it.
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9780449215043
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Mass Market Paperback
Story of a Three Day Pass
By Baird, Harry
A black soldier's captain demotes him for fraternizing with a white woman while on leave in France.
Publisher: n/a
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799106327
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Book
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
By William, Greaves,
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making. A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies. Criterion presents this long-unreleased gem in a special two-disc edition, along with its sequel, Take 2 1/2, made 35 years later with executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi.
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9781934121085
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Book
12 Years a Slave
By Northup, Solomon
The official movie tie-in edition to the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyongo, and directed by Steve McQueen New York Times bestseller"I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Franks Diary, only published nearly a hundred years before. . . . The book blew [my] mind: the epic range, the details, the adventure, the horror, and the humanity. . . . I hope my film can play a part in drawing attention to this important book of courage. Solomons bravery and life deserve nothing less." - Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, from the Foreword Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.
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9780143125419
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Paperback
The Dark Ages
By Jezer, Marty
Discusses the most important social, cultural, and political developments in postwar America and isolates the beginnings of the civil rights and peace movements
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9780896081284
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Book
African-American Art
By Patton, Sharon F.
From its origins in early eighteenth century slave communities to the end of the twentieth century, African American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. African American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s.
New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.
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9780192842541
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Book
From Auction Block to Glory
By Tucker, Phillip Thomas
Narrative by a Civil War historian and seasoned writer is intermingled with abundant illustrations (mostly b&w historical photos) in an attractively produced volume. It begins with a history of slavery from its European origins to establishment in the New World, then documents the successive phases and various aspects of African American involvement in the war effort. Of special note is coverage of black Confederates, whose story is often neglected in histories of the Civil War. Oversize: 10x10.5<"> Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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9781567995527
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Book
Friday Black
By Adjei-brenyah, Nana Kwame
"These stories are an excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny, yet classical in the way they take on stubborn human problems: the depravities of capitalism, love struggling to assert itself within heartless systems. The wildly talented Adjei-Brenyah has made these edgy tales immensely charming, via his resolute, heartful, immensely likeable narrators, capable of seeing the world as blessed and cursed at once." - George SaundersA piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America. From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's writing will grab you, haunt you, enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In "The Finkelstein Five," Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In "Zimmer Land," we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And "Friday Black" and "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King" show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all. Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.
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9781328911247
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Paperback
The Huey P. Newton Reader
By Newton, Huey P.
The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, Eldridge Cleaver’s controversial expulsion from the Party, FBI infiltration of civil rights groups, the Vietnam War, and the burgeoning feminist movement with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, and the author’s only written account of his political exile in Cuba in the mid-1970s. Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Geronimo Pratt all came to international prominence through Newton’s groundbreaking political activism. Additionally, Newton served as the Party’s chief intellectual engine, conversing with world leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Chinese Premier Chou Enlai, and Mozambique President Samora Moises Machel among others.
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9781583224663
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Book
Hidden in Plain View
By Tobin, Jacqueline L.
The fascinating story of a friendship, a lost tradition, and an incredible discovery, revealing how enslaved men and women made encoded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. . In Hidden in Plain View, historian Jacqueline Tobin and scholar Raymond Dobard offer the first proof that certain quilt patterns, including a prominent one called the Charleston Code, were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad. In 1993, historian Jacqueline Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts in the Old Market Building of Charleston, South Carolina. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. But just as quickly as she started, Williams stopped, informing Tobin that she would learn the rest when she was "ready." During the three years it took for Williamss narrative to unfold - and as the friendship and trust between the two women grew - Tobin enlisted Raymond Dobard, Ph.D., an art history professor and well-known African American quilter, to help unravel the mystery.. Part adventure and part history, Hidden in Plain View traces the origin of the Charleston Code from Africa to the Carolinas, from the low-country island Gullah peoples to free blacks living in the cities of the North, and shows how three people from completely different backgrounds pieced together one amazing American story.. With a new afterword. Illlustrations and photographs throughout, including a full-color photo insert.
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9780385491372
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Paperback
Black against Empire
By Bloom, Joshua
This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities. In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.
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9780520293281
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Print book
The Black Panthers
By Shih, Bryan
October 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, an organization that remains one of the most misunderstood of the twentieth century. But beyond the labels of "extremist" and "violent" that have marked the party, and behind charismatic leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver were the ordinary men and women who made up the Panther rank and file.In The Black Panthers, photojournalist Bryan Shih and historian Yohuru Williams offer a reappraisal of the party's history and legacy. Through stunning portraits, poignant interviews, and illuminating essays by leading scholars, the book reveals the grit and battle scars of the foot soldiers of the party, some of whom eventually became top party leaders themselves - and the undying love for the people that kept them going.
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9781568585550
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Print book
They Cant Kill Us All
By Lowery, Wesley
A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Browns death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Browns family and the families of other victims other victims families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Cant Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black communitys long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Cant Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.
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9780316312479
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Hardcover
The March Against Fear
By Bausum, Ann
James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement. It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality. The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath. Readers learn about the powerful figures and emerging leaders who joined the over 200-mile walk that became known as the "March Against Fear." Thoughtfully presented by award-winning author Ann Bausum, this book helps readers understand the complex issues of fear, injustice, and the challenges of change. It is a history lesson that's as important and relevant today as it was 50 years ago.
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9781426326653
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Print book
Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
By Abu-jamal, Mumia
"This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos."--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"[Mumia's] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently." - Cornel West"He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them." - Angela Y. DavisIn December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police.
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9780872867383
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Paperback
Alienation and Freedom
By Fanon, Frantz
Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanons work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day.. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output - which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanons entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.
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9781474250214
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Hardcover
No Ashes in the Fire
By Moore, Darnell L
From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir.When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he sets out to understand how that scared, bullied teenager not only survived, but found his calling. Moore traces his life from his childhood in Camden, New Jersey, a city scarred by uprisings and repression; to his search for intimacy in the gay neighborhoods of Philadelphia; and, finally, to the movements in Newark, Brooklyn, and Ferguson where he could fight for those who, like him, survive on society's edges.No Ashes in the Fire is a story of beauty and hope - and an honest reckoning with family, with place, and with what it means to be free.
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9781568589480
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Hardcover
Unapologetic
By Carruthers, Charlene A
This 21st-century activist's guide to upending mainstream ideas about race, class, and gender carves out a path to collective liberation.Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances.
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9780807019412
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Hardcover
How Long 'til Black Future Month?
By Jemisin, N. K.
Three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin's first collection of short fiction challenges and enchants with breathtaking stories of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out:The Inheritance TrilogyThe Hundred Thousand KingdomsThe Broken KingdomsThe Kingdom of GodsThe Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition) Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction) The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) Dreamblood DuologyThe Killing MoonThe Shadowed SunThe Dreamblood Duology (omnibus) The Broken EarthThe Fifth SeasonThe Obelisk GateThe Stone Sky
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9780316491341
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Hardcover
The Dark Ages
By Jezer, Marty
Discusses the most important social, cultural, and political developments in postwar America and isolates the beginnings of the civil rights and peace movements
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896081281
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Book
African-American Art
By Patton, Sharon F.
From its origins in early eighteenth century slave communities to the end of the twentieth century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. African-American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s.
New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.
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192842544
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Book
From Auction Block to Glory
By Tucker, Phillip Thomas
Narrative by a Civil War historian and seasoned writer is intermingled with abundant illustrations (mostly b&w historical photos) in an attractively produced volume. It begins with a history of slavery from its European origins to establishment in the New World, then documents the successive phases and various aspects of African American involvement in the war effort. Of special note is coverage of black Confederates, whose story is often neglected in histories of the Civil War. Oversize: 10x10.5<"> Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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1567995527
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Book
Hidden in Plain View
By Tobin, Jacqueline
"There are five square knots on the quilt every two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada. The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bears paw trail to the crossroads--"And so begins the fascinating story that was passed down from generation to generation in the family of Ozella McDaniel Williams. But what appears to be a simple story that was handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter is actually much, much more than that. In fact, it is a coded message steeped in African textile traditions that provides a link between slave-made quilts and the Underground Railroad.In 1993, author Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where local craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her.As Tobin sat in rapt attention, Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. But just as quickly as she started, Williams stopped, informing Tobin that she would learn the rest when she was "ready."During the three years it took for Williamss narrative to unfold--and as the friendship and trust between the two women grew--Tobin enlisted Raymond Dobard, Ph.D., an art history professor and well-known African American quilter, to help provide the historical context behind what Williams was describing.Now, based on Williamss story and their own research, Tobin and Dobard, in what they call "Ozellas Underground Railroad Quilt Code," offer proof that some slaves were involved in a sophisticated network that melded African textile traditions with American quilt practices and created a potent result: African American quilts with patterns that conveyed messages that were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad.
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385491379
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Hardcover
Help Me to Find My People
By Williams, Heather Andrea
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. . Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations..
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9780807835548
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Hardcover
Every Tone a Testimony - An African American Aural History
By Artists, Various
Encompassing both the African American oral and literary traditions by renowed African American musicans, writers and activists.
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970494211
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Book
The Half Has Never Been Told
By Baptist, Edward E
Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman PrizeA groundbreaking history demonstrating that Americas economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved peopleAmericans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nations original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from Americas later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.
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9780465002962
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Hardcover
Between the world and me
By Coates, Ta-nehisi
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * Hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States" (The New York Observer) "This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion.
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9780451482211
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Audiobook
The Fire This Time
By Ward, Jesmyn
The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race - collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation - are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify" (USA TODAY) .. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwins 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwins words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generations most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The Fire This Time is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume. In the fifty-odd years since Baldwins essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. Baldwins "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about. Contributors include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.
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9781501126345
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Hardcover
Original Gangstas
By Westhoff, Ben
"Invaluable... Westhoff's] book will stand as a comprehensive guide to an inner-city movement that conquered the world. """---"Publishers Weekly "A monumental, revealing narrative history about the legendary group of artists at the forefront of West Coast hip-hop: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur. Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N. W. A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N. W. A gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever--Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records, which in turn transformed Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur into superstars. Ben Westhoff explores how this group of artists shifted the balance of hip-hop from New York to Los Angeles. He shows how N. W. A. 's shocking success lead to rivalries between members, record labels, and eventually a war between East Coast and West Coast factions. In the process, hip-hop burst into mainstream America at a time of immense social change, and became the most dominant musical movement of the last thirty years. At gangsta rap's peak, two of its biggest names--Tupac and Biggie Smalls--were murdered, leaving the surviving artists to forge peace before the genre annihilated itself. Featuring extensive investigative reporting, interviews with the principal players, and dozens of never-before-told stories, "Original Gangstas" is a groundbreaking addition to the history of popular music.
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9780316383899
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Print book
At Mamas Knee
By Ryan, April
Winner of the African American Literary Show Award for Best Non-FictionIn her first book, The Presidency in Black and White, journalist April Ryan examined race in America through her experience as a White House reporter. In this book, she shifts the conversation from the White House to every home in America. At Mamas Knee looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children. As a single African American mother in Baltimore, Ryan has struggled with each gut wrenching, race related news story to find the words to convey the right lessons to her daughters. To better understand how mothers transfer to their children wisdom on race and race relations, she reached out to other mothers - prominent political leaders like Hillary Clinton and Valerie Jarrett, celebrities like Cindy Williams, and others like Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martins mother, whose lives have been impacted by prominent race related events. At a time when Americans still struggle to address racial division and prejudice, their stories remind us that attitudes change from one generation to the next and one child at a time.Features interviews with: Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; John Lewis, congressman; Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, Secretary of State, Presidential candidate; Cindy Williams, actress known for role of Shirley on Laverne & Shirley; Cory Booker, United States senator; Christopher Darden, OJ Simpson prosecutor; Michael Cole, actor best known for role of Pete on The Mod Squad; Valerie Jarrett, presidential advisor; Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy; Iyanla Vansant, author, life coach and television personality; Harry Belafonte, singer, songwriter, actor, and social activist; President Barack Obama; and President Jimmy Carter.
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9781442265639
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Hardcover
Smoketown
By Whitaker, Mark
The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place - Pittsburgh, PA - from the 1920s through the 1950s.Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson's famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson - and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Mark Whitaker's Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung community and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey - and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak.
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9781501122392
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Hardcover
I'm Still Here
By Brown, Austin Channing
From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion.In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, I'm Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words. Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice, in stories that bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric--from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations. For readers who have engaged with America's legacy on race through the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, I'm Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all.
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9781524760854
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Hardcover
What Truth Sounds Like
By Dyson, Michael Eric
What Truth Sounds Like is a timely exploration of America's tortured racial politics that continues the conversation from Michael Eric Dyson's New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop.President Barack Obama: "Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison."In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: "What in your heart has changed that's going to change the direction of this country?" "I don't believe you just change hearts," she protested. "I believe you change laws."The fraught conflict between conscience and politics - between morality and power - in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes.In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith's relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence.Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry - that the black folk assembled didn't understand politics, and that they weren't as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy's anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. "I guess if I were in his shoes ... I might feel differently about this country." Kennedy set about changing policy - the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways.There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he'd never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys' efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy - versus the racial experience of Baldwin - is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change.What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.
Publisher: n/a
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9781250295934
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Audiobook
On the Other Side of Freedom
By Mckesson, Deray
"On the Other Side of Freedom reveals the mind and motivations of a young man who has risen to the fore of millennial activism through study, discipline, and conviction. His belief in a world that can be made better, one act at a time, powers his narratives and opens up a view on the costs, consequences, and rewards of leading a movement." (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) Named one of the best books of the year by NPR and EsquireFinalist for the Lambda Literary Award From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines. In August 2014, 29-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nations complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racisms wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom. Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionarys call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.
Publisher: n/a
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9780525560326
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Audiobook
Go Ahead in the Rain
By Willis-abdurraqib, Hanif
How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that - like the low end, the bass - are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.
Publisher: n/a
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9781477316481
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Paperback
Me and White Supremacy
By Saad, Layla
In the summer of 2018, writer, speaker and podcast host Saad launched the 28-day Instagram challenge: #MeAndWhiteSupremacy. She never expected it to go viral or for the free workbook to be downloaded by over 90,000 people. Two years later, her initial challenge has been updated and expanded into this small but intense book which provokes readers to take personal ownership of the effort to dismantle systemic racism. As an East African, Arab, British, Black, and Muslim woman, Saad delivers an informed perspective on issues such as white fragility, cultural appropriation, and color blindness. She confronts the assumption that racism only operates outside of polite society and reveals itself in racial slurs and outward attacks, which is discussed with special focus in Day 6: You and White Exceptionalism. The fact is, white supremacy is far more insidious, manifest in nuanced ways, such as the idea that racism is a problem for Black, Indigenous, and people of color to solve. This book is not for the oppressed or the marginalized, but rather for those whose privilege, when left unchecked, has harmful consequences. Saad has created an insightful and necessary contribution to the work of combating racism and becoming good ancestors.
Publisher: n/a
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9781728209807
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Book
How to Be an Antiracist
By Kendi, Ibram X.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a "groundbreaking" (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society - and in ourselves."The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind." - The New York Times Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism - and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At it's core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas - from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilites - that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their posionous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.Praise for How to Be an Antiracist "Ibram X. Kendi's new book, How to Be an Antiracist, couldn't come at a better time. . . . Kendi has gifted us with a book that is not only an essential instruction manual but also a memoir of the author's own path from anti-black racism to anti-white racism and, finally, to antiracism. . . . How to Be an Antiracist gives us a clear and compelling way to approach, as Kendi puts it in his introduction, 'the basic struggle we're all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.' " - NPR"Kendi dissects why in a society where so few people consider themselves to be racist the divisions and inequalities of racism remain so prevalent. How to Be an Antiracist punctures the myths of a post-racial America, examining what racism really is - and what we should do about it." - Time
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9780525509288
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Hardcover
Stamped
By Reynolds, Jason
A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism--and antiracism--in AmericaThis is NOT a history book.This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are.A book about race. The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.
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9780316453691
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Hardcover
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
By Davis, Angela
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle.
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9781608465644
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Print book
The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen
By Larsen, Nella
This volume brings together the complete fiction of the author of Passing and Quicksand, one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Passing, Larsen's best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white bigot. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of Helga Crane, half black and half white, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.
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9780385721004
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Paperback
The Half Has Never Been Told
By Baptist, Edward E
[Read by Ron Butler][Includes a Bonus PDF]In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves, giving the country a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, a key raw material of the Industrial Revolution.As Baptist argues, this frenzy of speculation and economic expansion transformed the United States into a modern capitalist nation. Based on thousands of slave narratives and plantation records, The Half Has Never Been Told offers not only a radical revision of the history of slavery but a disturbing new understanding of the origins of American power that compels listeners to reckon with the violence and subjugation at the root of American supremacy.
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1483030679
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Audiobook on CD
Heavy
By Laymon, Kiese
In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we've been. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood - and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.
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9781501125652
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Hardcover
Party Music
By Vincent, Rickey
Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers’ R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries. Beyond the mainstream civil rights movement that is typically discussed are the stories of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, the antiwar activism, and other radical movements that were central to the impulse that transformed black popular music—and created soul music.
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1613744927
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Paperback
We're On
By Jordan, June
"June Jordan was not the blacksmith's daughter. June Jordan was the blacksmith. . . . She never waited around, not for anyone's permission, to write or act or be. . . . For this book to have its birth now, in the lopsided moment when we need it most, is no chance occurrence. This great woman blacksmith is still sweetly hammering us on." - Nikky FinneyPoet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer.From "Poem about Police Violence":Tell me somethingwhat you think would happen ifeverytime they kill a black boythen we kill a copeverytime they kill a black manthen we kill a copyou think the accident rate would lowersubsequently?.
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9781938584350
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Paperback
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky
By George, Lynell
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler offers a blueprint for a creative life from the perspective of award-winning science-fiction writer and "MacArthur Genius" Octavia E. Butler. It is a collection of ideas about how to look, listen, breathe -- how to be in the world. This book is about the creative process, but not on the page; its canvas is much larger. Author Lynell George not only engages the world that shaped Octavia E. Butler, she also explores the very specific processes through which Butler shaped herself -- her unique process of self-making. It's about creating a life with what little you have -- hand-me-down books, repurposed diaries, journals, stealing time to write in the middle of the night, making a small check stretch -- bit by bit by bit.
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9781626400634
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Hardcover
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
By Lorde, Audre
A complete collection -- over 300 poems -- from one of this country's most influential poets."These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page." -- Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms -- beautifully, forcefully -- for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate." -- Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving." -- Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume.
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9780393319729
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Paperback
Zami
By Lorde, Audre
“ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs
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895941228
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Paperback
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
By Clifton, Lucille
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton - both the woman and her poetry - is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness." - Toni Morrison, from the Foreword"If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it." - NPR"The Collected Clifton is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington PostThe Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Cliftons published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008) , and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Cliftons lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poets career.On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America."mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days) :all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.
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1934414905
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Hardcover
A Black Women's History of the United States
By Ramey, Berry, Daina
A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
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9780807033555
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Hardcover
How We Fight White Supremacy
By Solomon, Akiba
This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice-and ideas for how each of us can contribute Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.Featuring contributions from:Ta-Nehisi CoatesTarana BurkeHarry Belafonteadrienne maree brownAlicia GarzaPatrisse Khan-CullorsReverend Dr. Valerie BridgemanKiese LaymonJamilah Lemieux Robin DG KelleyDamon YoungMichael ArceneauxHanif AbdurraqibDr. Yaba BlayDiamond StingilyAmanda Seales Imani PerryDenene MillnerKierna MayoJohn JenningsDr. Joy Harden BradfordTongo Eisen-Martin
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9781568588490
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Paperback
Race Matters, 25th Anniversary
By West, Cornel
The fundamental litmus test for American democracy-its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture-remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line. --from the new PrefaceFirst published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters was a national best-seller, and it has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America. Race Matters contains West's most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X.
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9780807008836
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Paperback
American Uprising LP
By Rasmussen, Daniel
Breathtaking. Rasmussens scholarly detective work reveals a fascinating narrative of slavery and resistance, but it also tells us something about history itselfabout how fiction can become fact, and how history is sometimes nothing more than erasure. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Deeply researched, vividly written, and highly original. Eric FonerHistorian Daniel Rasmussen reveals the long-forgotten history of Americas largest slave uprising, the New Orleans slave revolt of 1811. In an epic, illuminating narrative, Rasmussen offers new insight into American expansionism, the path to Civil War, and the earliest grassroots push to overcome slavery.,
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9780062017888
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Paperback
African American Women of the Old West
By Wagner, Tricia Martineau
The brave pioneers who made a life on the frontier were not only male—and they were not only white. The story of African-American women in the Old West is one that has largely gone untold--until now. The story of ten African-American women is reconstructed from historic documents found in century-old archives. The ten remarkable women in Black Women of the Old West were all born before 1900, some were slaves, some were free, and some lived both ways during their lifetime. Among them were laundresses, freedom advocates, journalists, educators, midwives, business proprietors, religious converts, philanthropists, mail and freight haulers, and civil and social activists.
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9780762739004
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Paperback
The Black Church in America
By Battle, Michael
This book gives readers a broad understanding of the Black Church in America and a sense of its uniqueness in the wider world. Explores the history of the Black Church in America, its African roots, beliefs, practices, politics, and contemporary moral dilemmas Argues that in the Black Church, individual and communal destiny are bound together The author is a Priest in the Episcopal Church and teaches spirituality and Black Church studies at Duke University.,
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1405118911
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Hardcover
The Black Church in America
By Battle, Michael
This book gives readers a broad understanding of the Black Church in America and a sense of its uniqueness in the wider world. Explores the history of the Black Church in America, its African roots, beliefs, practices, politics, and contemporary moral dilemmas Argues that in the Black Church, individual and communal destiny are bound together The author is a Priest in the Episcopal Church and teaches spirituality and Black Church studies at Duke University.,
Bad Blood
By Jones, James H.
An account of the experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service describes how medical treatment was withheld from Black sharecroppers infected with syphilis.
Dancing Spirit
By Jamison, Judith
Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering figure. Her commanding physical presence and extraordinary technique have made her not only a superstar of American dance and an innovator in her field, but also an inspiration to African Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Last November, Doubleday published Dancing Spirit, this remarkable woman's autobiography. Now, with Anchor's paperback publication, an even wider audience can trace the steps of her career: her early years in Philadelphia, where she began studying dance at the age of six, her discovery by Agnes de Mille; years of frustration and struggle in a field that favored petite, fair, White women; her legendary collaboration with Alvin Ailey; her work on Broadway in the musical Sophisticated Ladies ; the formation of her own company, the Jamison Project, and her retum to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as artistic director after its founder's death in 1989. Dancing Spirit contains vivid portraits of many artists Jamison has worked with including Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Jessye Norman, Geoffrey Holder, Carmen de Lavallade, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to name only a few. And Jamison talks frankly about the price exacted by a dancer's nomadic life--rootlessness, fleeting relationships, the obsession with physical beauty. Illustrated with sixty photographs, Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance.
Philadelphia Fire
By Wideman, John Edgar
In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames.
Defending the Spirit
By Robinson, Randall
The founder of TransAfrica--a lobby group for the interests of African and Caribbean peoples--recollects his childhood in the segregated South, his rise to power as a Washington statesman, and the racism he encountered both at home and abroad. 15,000 first printing.
Before the Mayflower
By Bennett, Lerone
The black experience in America-- starting from its origins in western Africa up to the present day-- is examined in this seminal study from a prominent African American figure. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial period through the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The most recent scholarship on the geographic, social, economic, and cultural journeys of African Americans, together with vivid portraits of key black leaders, complete this comprehensive reference.
Families and Freedom
By Berlin, Ira
Through the dramatic and moving letters and testimony of freed slaves, Families and Freedom tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the Civil War era. Former slaves, free blacks, and their contemporaries recount the elation accompanying the reunion of brothers and sisters separated for half a lifetime and the anguished realization that time lost could never be made up.
Paradise
By Morrison, Toni
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present - in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.. "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins Toni Morrisons Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.. "A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate." - Los Angeles Times
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boys discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwins rendering of his protagonists spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." "With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story." - The New York Times
Soldiers of Freedom
By Wright, Kai
Spanning from the American Revolution to the war in Afghanistan, this long-overdue, comprehensive history covers the full scope of African Americans' involvement in the armed forces during war and peacetime. Accompanying the informative text are 300 photographs and illustrations, most of them rare, some never before published. Highlights include accounts of: - The Rhode Island 1st Regiment, the first all-black regiment in the U.S. Army. - The New Orleans Battalion of Free Men of Color. - The Battle for Richmond, which resulted in the largest loss of black life in the Civil War. - The 1863 New York City Draft Riot. - The 1919 lynchings of black war vets. - The Navy's reluctant integration during World War II. - The dramatic story of the Tuskegee Airmen.
Chains
By Anderson, Laurie Halse
If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl? As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom. From acclaimed author Laurie Halse Anderson comes this compelling, impeccably researched novel that shows the lengths we can go to cast off our chains, both physical and spiritual.
Death or Liberty
By Egerton, Douglas R
In Death or Liberty, Douglas R. Egerton offers a sweeping chronicle of African American history stretching from Britains 1763 victory in the Seven Years War to the election of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800. While American slavery is usually identified with antebellumcotton plantations, Egerton shows that on the eve of the Revolution it encompassed everything from wading in the South Carolina rice fields to carting goods around Manhattan to serving the households of Bostons elite. More important, he recaptures the drama of slaves, freed blacks, and whitereformers fighting to make the young nation fulfill its republican slogans. Although this struggle often unfolded in the corridors of power, Egerton pays special attention to what black Americans did for themselves in these decades, and his narrative brims with compelling portraits of forgottenAfrican American activists and rebels, who battled huge odds and succeeded in finding liberty--if never equality--only in northern states. Egerton concludes that despite the real possibility of peaceful, if gradual, emancipation, the Founders ultimately lacked the courage to end slavery.
The Making of African America
By Berlin, Ira
A leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuries Four great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. These epic migrations have made and remade African American life. Ira Berlin's magisterial new account of these passages evokes both the terrible price and the moving triumphs of a people forcibly and then willingly migrating to America.
Kansas City Lightning
By Crouch, Stanley
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America.Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four.Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City Lightning recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered.
Stokely
By Joseph, Peniel E
Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one humid Mississippi night in 1966. Carmichaels life changed that day, and so did Americas struggle for civil rights. "Black Power" became the slogan of an era, provoking a national reckoning on race and democracy. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, arguing that the young firebrands evolution from nonviolent activist to Black Power revolutionary reflected the trajectory of a generation radicalized by the violence and unrest of the late 1960s. Fed up with the slow progress of the civil rights movement, Carmichael urged Blacks to turn the rhetoric of freedom into a reality, inspiring countless African Americans to demand immediate political self-determination. A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision reshaped the struggle for African American equality.
Represent
By
This publication highlights nearly 150 objects in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that were created by American artists of African descent. Introduced with an essay by the distinguished scholar Richard J. Powell, the volume includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, costume and textiles, and photography by some 100 artists, from classically trained painters such as Henry Ossawa Tanner to self-taught artists such as Bill Traylor. Informative, thematic essays by the consulting curator, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, are followed by individual object entries as well as texts spotlighting areas of collecting strength, many of them written by members of the museum's curatorial staff. The first major publication to focus on the museum's diverse collection of works by African American artists, this volume also offers a fresh scholarly perspective on African American art from the early 19th century to the present.
Giovanni's Room
By Baldwin, James
James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris.David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night - "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni's Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
American Histories
By Wideman, John Edgar
In a new short story collection, John Edgar Wideman - the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life - explores subjects from the historical to the imagined, with a cast of fictional and real-life characters as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Jean Michael Basquiat, and his own family.John Edgar Wideman, lauded throughout his career, is a master at many forms. His latest offering, a collection of complex, charged stories, is a stunning marriage of the personal and historical. "JB & FD" re-imagines conversations between John Brown, the White antislavery crusader who famously raided Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist and orator. "Maps and Ledgers" examines a painful incident in the narrator's childhood and his relationship with his father. "Williamsburg Bridge" follows a man contemplating suicide. "My Dead" considers the narrator's departed brother and uncle. These stories are spellbinding narrative reflections on abolitionists and artists, fathers and sons, the bonds of family and the pull of memory. Wideman's fiction challenges the boundaries of the form. His stories operate on many levels, weaving together historical fact, imagined conversation, philosophical kernels, and deeply personal vignettes. As a whole, American Histories amounts to more than the sum of its parts, an extended meditation on family, history, and loss. This is Wideman at his best, most emotionally precise, and most intellectually stimulating.
Heart & Soul
By Merlis, Bob
Heart & Soul celebrates the nearly half-cent ury (1930-1975) of flamboyant and extravagant flowering in A frican-American culture that enriched the entire world. From the Jackson Five to the Four Tops, it was an era of audacio us showmen. '
Contact High
By Tobak, Vikki
An inside look at the work of hip-hop photographers told through their most intimate diaries - their contact sheets. Featuring rare outtakes from over 100 photoshoots alongside interviews and essays from industry legends, Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop takes readers on a chronological journey from old-school to alternative hip-hop and from analog to digital photography. The ultimate companion for music and photography enthusiasts, Contact High is the definitive history of hip-hop's early days, celebrating the artists that shaped the iconic album covers, t-shirts and posters beloved by hip-hop fans today. With essays from BILL ADLER, RHEA L. COMBS, FAB 5 FREDDY, MICHAEL GONZALES, YOUNG GURU, DJ PREMIER, and RZA
Paul Robeson
By Swindall, Lindsey R.
Paul Robeson: A Life of Activism and Art is the biography of an African American icon and a demonstration of historian Lindsey R. Swindall's knack for thorough, detailed research and reflection. Paul Robeson was, at points in his life, an actor, singer, football player, political activist and writer, one of the most diversely talented members of the Harlem Renaissance. Swindall centers Robeson's story around the argument that while Robeson leaned toward Socialism, a Pan-African perspective is fundamental to understanding his life as an artist and political advocate. Many previous works on Robeson have focused primarily on his involvement with the US Communist Party, paying little attention to the broader African influences on his politics and art. With each chapter focused on a decade of his life, this book affords us a fresh look at his story, and the ways in which the struggles, successes and studies of his formative years came to shape him as an artist, activist and man later on.
Kobe Doin' Work
By Lee, Spike
An unprecedented inside look at a day in the life of this basketball superstar as he prepares for one of the biggest games of the season, from the locker room to being on the court.
Daughters of the Dust
By Day, Cora
At the dawn of the 20th century, a multi-generational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina - former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors' Yoruba traditions - struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots. Cohen Media Group is proud to present the 25th anniversary restoration of director Julie Dash's landmark film "Daughters of the Dust." The first wide release by a black female filmmaker, "Daughters of the Dust" was met with wild critical acclaim and rapturous audience response when it initially opened in 1991. Casting a long legacy, "Daughters of the Dust" still resonates today, most recently as a major in influence on Beyoncé's video album "Lemonade.
Bound to the Fire
By Deetz, Kelley Fanto
In grocery store aisles and kitchens across the country, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks can be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images are sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represent the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nations culinary and hospitality traditions even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.. Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon skills and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes such as oyster stew, gumbo, and fried fish. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations. . Focusing on enslaved cooks at Virginia plantations including Thomas Jeffersons Monticello and George Washingtons Mount Vernon, Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history. Bound to the Fire not only uncovers their rich and complex stories and illuminates their role in plantation culture, but it celebrates their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.
The cooking gene
By Twitty, Michael
"A memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces the paths of the author's ancestors (black and white) through the crucible of slavery to show its effects on our food today"--
A Ballerinas Tale
By Copeland, Misty
Iconic ballerina Misty Copeland made history when she became the first African-American woman to be named principal dancer of the legendary American Ballet Theater. Get the incredible, behind-the-scenes story of how she overcame outmoded ballet culture stereotypes and near career-ending injuries to become one of the most revered dancers of her generation.
Killer of Sheep
By Burnett, Charles
An American masterpiece, independent to the bone. --Manohla Dargis, New York TimesThe finest film yet about African American life. --National Public RadioWay ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, KILLER OF SHEEP is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive... Here's to the miracle of a buried classic granted the opposite of a killing - here's to life. Grade: A.-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly --Acclaimed ReviewsThe finest film yet about African American life. - --National Public RadioWay ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, KILLER OF SHEEP is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive... Here's to the miracle of a buried classic granted the opposite of a killing - here's to life.
Learning Tree
By Parks, Gordon
"A fine novel."THE BOSTON HERALDPhotographer, writer, and composer, Gordon Parks has written a moving, true-to-life novel of growing up as a black man in this country in this century. Hailed by critics and readers alike, THE LEARNING TREE tells the extraordinary journey of a family as they struggle to understand the world around them and leave their mark a world that is better for their having been in it.
Story of a Three Day Pass
By Baird, Harry
A black soldier's captain demotes him for fraternizing with a white woman while on leave in France.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
By William, Greaves,
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making. A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies. Criterion presents this long-unreleased gem in a special two-disc edition, along with its sequel, Take 2 1/2, made 35 years later with executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi.
12 Years a Slave
By Northup, Solomon
The official movie tie-in edition to the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyongo, and directed by Steve McQueen New York Times bestseller"I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Franks Diary, only published nearly a hundred years before. . . . The book blew [my] mind: the epic range, the details, the adventure, the horror, and the humanity. . . . I hope my film can play a part in drawing attention to this important book of courage. Solomons bravery and life deserve nothing less." - Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, from the Foreword Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.
The Dark Ages
By Jezer, Marty
Discusses the most important social, cultural, and political developments in postwar America and isolates the beginnings of the civil rights and peace movements
African-American Art
By Patton, Sharon F.
From its origins in early eighteenth century slave communities to the end of the twentieth century, African American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. African American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s.
New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.
From Auction Block to Glory
By Tucker, Phillip Thomas
Narrative by a Civil War historian and seasoned writer is intermingled with abundant illustrations (mostly b&w historical photos) in an attractively produced volume. It begins with a history of slavery from its European origins to establishment in the New World, then documents the successive phases and various aspects of African American involvement in the war effort. Of special note is coverage of black Confederates, whose story is often neglected in histories of the Civil War. Oversize: 10x10.5<"> Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Friday Black
By Adjei-brenyah, Nana Kwame
"These stories are an excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny, yet classical in the way they take on stubborn human problems: the depravities of capitalism, love struggling to assert itself within heartless systems. The wildly talented Adjei-Brenyah has made these edgy tales immensely charming, via his resolute, heartful, immensely likeable narrators, capable of seeing the world as blessed and cursed at once." - George SaundersA piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America. From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's writing will grab you, haunt you, enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In "The Finkelstein Five," Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In "Zimmer Land," we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And "Friday Black" and "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King" show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all. Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.
The Huey P. Newton Reader
By Newton, Huey P.
The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, Eldridge Cleaver’s controversial expulsion from the Party, FBI infiltration of civil rights groups, the Vietnam War, and the burgeoning feminist movement with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, and the author’s only written account of his political exile in Cuba in the mid-1970s. Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Geronimo Pratt all came to international prominence through Newton’s groundbreaking political activism. Additionally, Newton served as the Party’s chief intellectual engine, conversing with world leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Chinese Premier Chou Enlai, and Mozambique President Samora Moises Machel among others.
Hidden in Plain View
By Tobin, Jacqueline L.
The fascinating story of a friendship, a lost tradition, and an incredible discovery, revealing how enslaved men and women made encoded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. . In Hidden in Plain View, historian Jacqueline Tobin and scholar Raymond Dobard offer the first proof that certain quilt patterns, including a prominent one called the Charleston Code, were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad. In 1993, historian Jacqueline Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts in the Old Market Building of Charleston, South Carolina. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. But just as quickly as she started, Williams stopped, informing Tobin that she would learn the rest when she was "ready." During the three years it took for Williamss narrative to unfold - and as the friendship and trust between the two women grew - Tobin enlisted Raymond Dobard, Ph.D., an art history professor and well-known African American quilter, to help unravel the mystery.. Part adventure and part history, Hidden in Plain View traces the origin of the Charleston Code from Africa to the Carolinas, from the low-country island Gullah peoples to free blacks living in the cities of the North, and shows how three people from completely different backgrounds pieced together one amazing American story.. With a new afterword. Illlustrations and photographs throughout, including a full-color photo insert.
Black against Empire
By Bloom, Joshua
This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities. In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.
The Black Panthers
By Shih, Bryan
October 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, an organization that remains one of the most misunderstood of the twentieth century. But beyond the labels of "extremist" and "violent" that have marked the party, and behind charismatic leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver were the ordinary men and women who made up the Panther rank and file.In The Black Panthers, photojournalist Bryan Shih and historian Yohuru Williams offer a reappraisal of the party's history and legacy. Through stunning portraits, poignant interviews, and illuminating essays by leading scholars, the book reveals the grit and battle scars of the foot soldiers of the party, some of whom eventually became top party leaders themselves - and the undying love for the people that kept them going.
They Cant Kill Us All
By Lowery, Wesley
A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Browns death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Browns family and the families of other victims other victims families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Cant Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black communitys long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Cant Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.
The March Against Fear
By Bausum, Ann
James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement. It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality. The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath. Readers learn about the powerful figures and emerging leaders who joined the over 200-mile walk that became known as the "March Against Fear." Thoughtfully presented by award-winning author Ann Bausum, this book helps readers understand the complex issues of fear, injustice, and the challenges of change. It is a history lesson that's as important and relevant today as it was 50 years ago.
Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
By Abu-jamal, Mumia
"This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos."--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"[Mumia's] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently." - Cornel West"He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them." - Angela Y. DavisIn December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police.
Alienation and Freedom
By Fanon, Frantz
Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanons work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day.. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output - which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanons entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.
No Ashes in the Fire
By Moore, Darnell L
From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir.When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he sets out to understand how that scared, bullied teenager not only survived, but found his calling. Moore traces his life from his childhood in Camden, New Jersey, a city scarred by uprisings and repression; to his search for intimacy in the gay neighborhoods of Philadelphia; and, finally, to the movements in Newark, Brooklyn, and Ferguson where he could fight for those who, like him, survive on society's edges.No Ashes in the Fire is a story of beauty and hope - and an honest reckoning with family, with place, and with what it means to be free.
Unapologetic
By Carruthers, Charlene A
This 21st-century activist's guide to upending mainstream ideas about race, class, and gender carves out a path to collective liberation.Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances.
How Long 'til Black Future Month?
By Jemisin, N. K.
Three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin's first collection of short fiction challenges and enchants with breathtaking stories of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out:The Inheritance TrilogyThe Hundred Thousand KingdomsThe Broken KingdomsThe Kingdom of GodsThe Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition) Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction) The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) Dreamblood DuologyThe Killing MoonThe Shadowed SunThe Dreamblood Duology (omnibus) The Broken EarthThe Fifth SeasonThe Obelisk GateThe Stone Sky
The Dark Ages
By Jezer, Marty
Discusses the most important social, cultural, and political developments in postwar America and isolates the beginnings of the civil rights and peace movements
African-American Art
By Patton, Sharon F.
From its origins in early eighteenth century slave communities to the end of the twentieth century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. African-American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s.
New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.
From Auction Block to Glory
By Tucker, Phillip Thomas
Narrative by a Civil War historian and seasoned writer is intermingled with abundant illustrations (mostly b&w historical photos) in an attractively produced volume. It begins with a history of slavery from its European origins to establishment in the New World, then documents the successive phases and various aspects of African American involvement in the war effort. Of special note is coverage of black Confederates, whose story is often neglected in histories of the Civil War. Oversize: 10x10.5<"> Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Hidden in Plain View
By Tobin, Jacqueline
"There are five square knots on the quilt every two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada. The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bears paw trail to the crossroads--"And so begins the fascinating story that was passed down from generation to generation in the family of Ozella McDaniel Williams. But what appears to be a simple story that was handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter is actually much, much more than that. In fact, it is a coded message steeped in African textile traditions that provides a link between slave-made quilts and the Underground Railroad.In 1993, author Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where local craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her.As Tobin sat in rapt attention, Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. But just as quickly as she started, Williams stopped, informing Tobin that she would learn the rest when she was "ready."During the three years it took for Williamss narrative to unfold--and as the friendship and trust between the two women grew--Tobin enlisted Raymond Dobard, Ph.D., an art history professor and well-known African American quilter, to help provide the historical context behind what Williams was describing.Now, based on Williamss story and their own research, Tobin and Dobard, in what they call "Ozellas Underground Railroad Quilt Code," offer proof that some slaves were involved in a sophisticated network that melded African textile traditions with American quilt practices and created a potent result: African American quilts with patterns that conveyed messages that were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad.
Help Me to Find My People
By Williams, Heather Andrea
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. . Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations..
Every Tone a Testimony - An African American Aural History
By Artists, Various
Encompassing both the African American oral and literary traditions by renowed African American musicans, writers and activists.
The Half Has Never Been Told
By Baptist, Edward E
Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman PrizeA groundbreaking history demonstrating that Americas economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved peopleAmericans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nations original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from Americas later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.
Between the world and me
By Coates, Ta-nehisi
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * Hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States" (The New York Observer) "This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion.
The Fire This Time
By Ward, Jesmyn
The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race - collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation - are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify" (USA TODAY) .. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwins 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwins words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generations most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The Fire This Time is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume. In the fifty-odd years since Baldwins essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. Baldwins "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about. Contributors include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.
Original Gangstas
By Westhoff, Ben
"Invaluable... Westhoff's] book will stand as a comprehensive guide to an inner-city movement that conquered the world. """---"Publishers Weekly "A monumental, revealing narrative history about the legendary group of artists at the forefront of West Coast hip-hop: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur. Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N. W. A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N. W. A gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever--Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records, which in turn transformed Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur into superstars. Ben Westhoff explores how this group of artists shifted the balance of hip-hop from New York to Los Angeles. He shows how N. W. A. 's shocking success lead to rivalries between members, record labels, and eventually a war between East Coast and West Coast factions. In the process, hip-hop burst into mainstream America at a time of immense social change, and became the most dominant musical movement of the last thirty years. At gangsta rap's peak, two of its biggest names--Tupac and Biggie Smalls--were murdered, leaving the surviving artists to forge peace before the genre annihilated itself. Featuring extensive investigative reporting, interviews with the principal players, and dozens of never-before-told stories, "Original Gangstas" is a groundbreaking addition to the history of popular music.
At Mamas Knee
By Ryan, April
Winner of the African American Literary Show Award for Best Non-FictionIn her first book, The Presidency in Black and White, journalist April Ryan examined race in America through her experience as a White House reporter. In this book, she shifts the conversation from the White House to every home in America. At Mamas Knee looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children. As a single African American mother in Baltimore, Ryan has struggled with each gut wrenching, race related news story to find the words to convey the right lessons to her daughters. To better understand how mothers transfer to their children wisdom on race and race relations, she reached out to other mothers - prominent political leaders like Hillary Clinton and Valerie Jarrett, celebrities like Cindy Williams, and others like Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martins mother, whose lives have been impacted by prominent race related events. At a time when Americans still struggle to address racial division and prejudice, their stories remind us that attitudes change from one generation to the next and one child at a time.Features interviews with: Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; John Lewis, congressman; Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, Secretary of State, Presidential candidate; Cindy Williams, actress known for role of Shirley on Laverne & Shirley; Cory Booker, United States senator; Christopher Darden, OJ Simpson prosecutor; Michael Cole, actor best known for role of Pete on The Mod Squad; Valerie Jarrett, presidential advisor; Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy; Iyanla Vansant, author, life coach and television personality; Harry Belafonte, singer, songwriter, actor, and social activist; President Barack Obama; and President Jimmy Carter.
Smoketown
By Whitaker, Mark
The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place - Pittsburgh, PA - from the 1920s through the 1950s.Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson's famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson - and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Mark Whitaker's Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung community and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey - and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak.
I'm Still Here
By Brown, Austin Channing
From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion.In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, I'm Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words. Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice, in stories that bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric--from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations. For readers who have engaged with America's legacy on race through the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, I'm Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all.
What Truth Sounds Like
By Dyson, Michael Eric
What Truth Sounds Like is a timely exploration of America's tortured racial politics that continues the conversation from Michael Eric Dyson's New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop.President Barack Obama: "Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison."In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: "What in your heart has changed that's going to change the direction of this country?" "I don't believe you just change hearts," she protested. "I believe you change laws."The fraught conflict between conscience and politics - between morality and power - in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes.In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith's relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence.Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry - that the black folk assembled didn't understand politics, and that they weren't as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy's anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. "I guess if I were in his shoes ... I might feel differently about this country." Kennedy set about changing policy - the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways.There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he'd never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys' efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy - versus the racial experience of Baldwin - is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change.What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.
On the Other Side of Freedom
By Mckesson, Deray
"On the Other Side of Freedom reveals the mind and motivations of a young man who has risen to the fore of millennial activism through study, discipline, and conviction. His belief in a world that can be made better, one act at a time, powers his narratives and opens up a view on the costs, consequences, and rewards of leading a movement." (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) Named one of the best books of the year by NPR and EsquireFinalist for the Lambda Literary Award From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines. In August 2014, 29-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nations complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racisms wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom. Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionarys call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.
Go Ahead in the Rain
By Willis-abdurraqib, Hanif
How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that - like the low end, the bass - are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.
Me and White Supremacy
By Saad, Layla
In the summer of 2018, writer, speaker and podcast host Saad launched the 28-day Instagram challenge: #MeAndWhiteSupremacy. She never expected it to go viral or for the free workbook to be downloaded by over 90,000 people. Two years later, her initial challenge has been updated and expanded into this small but intense book which provokes readers to take personal ownership of the effort to dismantle systemic racism. As an East African, Arab, British, Black, and Muslim woman, Saad delivers an informed perspective on issues such as white fragility, cultural appropriation, and color blindness. She confronts the assumption that racism only operates outside of polite society and reveals itself in racial slurs and outward attacks, which is discussed with special focus in Day 6: You and White Exceptionalism. The fact is, white supremacy is far more insidious, manifest in nuanced ways, such as the idea that racism is a problem for Black, Indigenous, and people of color to solve. This book is not for the oppressed or the marginalized, but rather for those whose privilege, when left unchecked, has harmful consequences. Saad has created an insightful and necessary contribution to the work of combating racism and becoming good ancestors.
How to Be an Antiracist
By Kendi, Ibram X.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a "groundbreaking" (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society - and in ourselves."The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind." - The New York Times Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism - and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At it's core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas - from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilites - that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their posionous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.Praise for How to Be an Antiracist "Ibram X. Kendi's new book, How to Be an Antiracist, couldn't come at a better time. . . . Kendi has gifted us with a book that is not only an essential instruction manual but also a memoir of the author's own path from anti-black racism to anti-white racism and, finally, to antiracism. . . . How to Be an Antiracist gives us a clear and compelling way to approach, as Kendi puts it in his introduction, 'the basic struggle we're all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.' " - NPR"Kendi dissects why in a society where so few people consider themselves to be racist the divisions and inequalities of racism remain so prevalent. How to Be an Antiracist punctures the myths of a post-racial America, examining what racism really is - and what we should do about it." - Time
Stamped
By Reynolds, Jason
A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism--and antiracism--in AmericaThis is NOT a history book.This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are.A book about race. The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
By Davis, Angela
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle.
The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen
By Larsen, Nella
This volume brings together the complete fiction of the author of Passing and Quicksand, one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Passing, Larsen's best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white bigot. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of Helga Crane, half black and half white, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.
The Half Has Never Been Told
By Baptist, Edward E
[Read by Ron Butler][Includes a Bonus PDF]In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves, giving the country a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, a key raw material of the Industrial Revolution.As Baptist argues, this frenzy of speculation and economic expansion transformed the United States into a modern capitalist nation. Based on thousands of slave narratives and plantation records, The Half Has Never Been Told offers not only a radical revision of the history of slavery but a disturbing new understanding of the origins of American power that compels listeners to reckon with the violence and subjugation at the root of American supremacy.
Heavy
By Laymon, Kiese
In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we've been. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood - and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.
Party Music
By Vincent, Rickey
Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers’ R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries. Beyond the mainstream civil rights movement that is typically discussed are the stories of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, the antiwar activism, and other radical movements that were central to the impulse that transformed black popular music—and created soul music.
We're On
By Jordan, June
"June Jordan was not the blacksmith's daughter. June Jordan was the blacksmith. . . . She never waited around, not for anyone's permission, to write or act or be. . . . For this book to have its birth now, in the lopsided moment when we need it most, is no chance occurrence. This great woman blacksmith is still sweetly hammering us on." - Nikky FinneyPoet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer.From "Poem about Police Violence":Tell me somethingwhat you think would happen ifeverytime they kill a black boythen we kill a copeverytime they kill a black manthen we kill a copyou think the accident rate would lowersubsequently?.
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky
By George, Lynell
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler offers a blueprint for a creative life from the perspective of award-winning science-fiction writer and "MacArthur Genius" Octavia E. Butler. It is a collection of ideas about how to look, listen, breathe -- how to be in the world. This book is about the creative process, but not on the page; its canvas is much larger. Author Lynell George not only engages the world that shaped Octavia E. Butler, she also explores the very specific processes through which Butler shaped herself -- her unique process of self-making. It's about creating a life with what little you have -- hand-me-down books, repurposed diaries, journals, stealing time to write in the middle of the night, making a small check stretch -- bit by bit by bit.
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
By Lorde, Audre
A complete collection -- over 300 poems -- from one of this country's most influential poets."These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page." -- Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms -- beautifully, forcefully -- for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate." -- Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving." -- Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume.
Zami
By Lorde, Audre
“ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
By Clifton, Lucille
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton - both the woman and her poetry - is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness." - Toni Morrison, from the Foreword"If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it." - NPR"The Collected Clifton is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington PostThe Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Cliftons published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008) , and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Cliftons lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poets career.On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America."mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days) :all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.
A Black Women's History of the United States
By Ramey, Berry, Daina
A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
How We Fight White Supremacy
By Solomon, Akiba
This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice-and ideas for how each of us can contribute Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.Featuring contributions from:Ta-Nehisi CoatesTarana BurkeHarry Belafonteadrienne maree brownAlicia GarzaPatrisse Khan-CullorsReverend Dr. Valerie BridgemanKiese LaymonJamilah Lemieux Robin DG KelleyDamon YoungMichael ArceneauxHanif AbdurraqibDr. Yaba BlayDiamond StingilyAmanda Seales Imani PerryDenene MillnerKierna MayoJohn JenningsDr. Joy Harden BradfordTongo Eisen-Martin
Race Matters, 25th Anniversary
By West, Cornel
The fundamental litmus test for American democracy-its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture-remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line. --from the new PrefaceFirst published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters was a national best-seller, and it has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America. Race Matters contains West's most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X.
American Uprising LP
By Rasmussen, Daniel
Breathtaking. Rasmussens scholarly detective work reveals a fascinating narrative of slavery and resistance, but it also tells us something about history itselfabout how fiction can become fact, and how history is sometimes nothing more than erasure. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Deeply researched, vividly written, and highly original. Eric FonerHistorian Daniel Rasmussen reveals the long-forgotten history of Americas largest slave uprising, the New Orleans slave revolt of 1811. In an epic, illuminating narrative, Rasmussen offers new insight into American expansionism, the path to Civil War, and the earliest grassroots push to overcome slavery.,
African American Women of the Old West
By Wagner, Tricia Martineau
The brave pioneers who made a life on the frontier were not only male—and they were not only white. The story of African-American women in the Old West is one that has largely gone untold--until now. The story of ten African-American women is reconstructed from historic documents found in century-old archives. The ten remarkable women in Black Women of the Old West were all born before 1900, some were slaves, some were free, and some lived both ways during their lifetime. Among them were laundresses, freedom advocates, journalists, educators, midwives, business proprietors, religious converts, philanthropists, mail and freight haulers, and civil and social activists.
The Black Church in America
By Battle, Michael
This book gives readers a broad understanding of the Black Church in America and a sense of its uniqueness in the wider world. Explores the history of the Black Church in America, its African roots, beliefs, practices, politics, and contemporary moral dilemmas Argues that in the Black Church, individual and communal destiny are bound together The author is a Priest in the Episcopal Church and teaches spirituality and Black Church studies at Duke University.,
The Black Church in America
By Battle, Michael
This book gives readers a broad understanding of the Black Church in America and a sense of its uniqueness in the wider world. Explores the history of the Black Church in America, its African roots, beliefs, practices, politics, and contemporary moral dilemmas Argues that in the Black Church, individual and communal destiny are bound together The author is a Priest in the Episcopal Church and teaches spirituality and Black Church studies at Duke University.,