"Black Futures is a collection of work--art, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more--that tells the story of the radical, imaginative, bold, and beautiful world that black artists, high and low, are producing today. The book presents a succession of brilliant and provocative pieces--from both emerging and renowned creators of all kinds--that generates an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with hackers and street artists to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful prose to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. A generational document that captures this fast-moving generation in its own dynamic and exspansive language. While shaped in the tradition of other generational statements, from The New Negro to Black Fire to Toni Morrison's landmark The Black Book, Black Futures does not have a retrospective air. It showcases the present, but points to the future. We live at a time when black culture--whether it's created by Ava DuVernay or Donald Glover, Kendrick Lamar or Cardi B, meme-makers or YouTubers--is opening our imaginations and offering new paths forward, a multi-voiced, utopian alternative to a world of walls and white nationalism. Black Futures captures this expansive vision and energy and makes it available to any reader, of any color, who wants to explore this exciting cultural moment and see the next one coming"--

Savannah Riddle feels suffocated by her life as the daughter of an upper class African American family in Washington, D.C., until she meets a working-class girl named Nella who introduces her to the suffragette and socialist movements and to her politically active cousin Lloyd.

"This book is a political and intellectual history of black freethought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning its analysis in the era of slavery, "Black Freethinkers" demonstrates an alternative origin to nonbelief and religious skepticism in America, namely the brutality of the institution of slavery. The book then turns to the growth of atheism and agnosticism among African Americans in two major political and intellectual movements of the 1920s: the New Negro Renaissance and the growth of black socialism and communism. A final chapter explores the critical importance of freethought among participants in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Key figures in this narrative include well-known people such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, as well as lesser known thinkers such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Sarah Webster Fabio, and David Cincore. The study employs a diverse array of sources, including slave narratives, travel accounts, novels, poetry, memoirs, newspapers, and archival sources such as church records, sermons, and letters. The central argument of the book is that freethought, which includes atheism, agnosticism, and non-traditional religious orientations such as deism and paganism, has been a central component of black political and intellectual life from the 19th century to the present. Contrary to historical and popular depictions of African Americans as naturally religious, this study demonstrates the great diversity in black religious thought and makes an important contribution to our understanding of black intellectual history"-- Provided by publisher.

Gail Lumet Buckley, daughter of actress Lena Horne, delves deeply into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African American family from Civil War to civil rights.