The bestselling, definitive study of African Americans throughout American history, now with a new introduction by noted scholar V. P. Franklin.

In The Negro in the Making of America, eminent historian Benjamin Quarles provides one of the most comprehensive and readable accounts ever gathered in one volume of the role that African Americans have played in shaping the destiny of America. Starting with the arrival of the slave ships in the early 1600s and moving through the Colonial period, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and into the last half of the twentieth century, Quarles chronicles the sweep of events that have brought blacks and their struggle for social and economic equality to the forefront of American life.

Through compelling portraits of central political, historical, and artistic figures such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Quarles illuminates the African American contributions that have enriched the cultural heritage of America. This classic history also covers black participation in politics, the rise of a black business class, and the forms of discrimination experienced by blacks in housing, employment, and the media.

Quarles's groundbreaking work not only surveys the role of black Americans as they engaged in the dual, simultaneous processes of assimilating into and transforming the culture of their country, but also, in a portrait of the white response to blacks, holds a mirror up to the deeper moral complexion of our nation's history. The restoration of this history holds a redemptive quality—one that can be used, in the author's words, as a "vehicle for present enlightenment, guidance, and enrichment."

In this, provocative, timely, and painstakingly researched book, the award-winning author of Think Black tells the story of how Black labor helped to create and sustain the wealth of the white one percent throughout American history.

Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of individual Black men and women as a lens to explore the role they have played in creating American institutions of power and wealth—in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and many other fields—while not being allowed to fully participate or share in the rewards. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets. Of Blood and Sweat goes back through time to excavate the roots of this struggle, from pre-colonial Africa through post-Civil War America. As Ford reveals, in tracing the history of almost any major American institution of power and wealth you’ll find it was created by Black Americans, or created to control them.

Painstakingly researched and documented, Of Blood and Sweat is a compelling look at the past that holds broad implications for present-day calls for racial equity, racial justice, and the abolishment of systemic racism, and offers invaluable insight into our understanding of Black history and the story of America.

A classic analysis of the Black middle class studies its origin and development, accentuating its behavior, attitudes, and values during the 1940s and 1950s.

When it was first published in 1957, E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie was simultaneously reviled and revered—revered for its skillful dissection of one of America’s most complex communities, reviled for daring to cast a critical eye on a section of black society that had achieved the trappings of the white, bourgeois ideal.

The author traces the evolution of this enigmatic class from the segregated South to the post-war boom in the integrated North, showing how, along the road to what seemed like prosperity and progress, middle-class blacks actually lost their roots to the traditional black world while never achieving acknowledgment from the white sector. The result, concluded Frazier, is an anomalous bourgeois class with no identity, built on self-sustaining myths of black business and society, silently undermined by a collective, debilitating inferiority complex.

Bold, unflinching, and urgent—a pioneering guide to dismantling racist stereotypes and creating real change.

From Black Lives Matter to the stark inequities exposed by COVID-19, America's history of racial bias demands a new approach to understanding and action. Award-winning diversity expert Dr. Omekongo Dibinga reveals how even seemingly "innocent" stereotypes are rooted in hatred and continue to harm Black communities today.

In Lies About Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters, Dr. Dibinga combines powerful personal narratives, historical context, and contemporary analysis to expose the real-world impact of racist myths. Through intimate interviews, compelling research, and interactive exercises, readers will:

* Identify and confront their own hidden biases
* Master essential vocabulary for meaningful discussions about race
* Learn concrete ways to use privilege as a force for positive change
* Understand how common stereotypes—from "natural athletic ability" to "can't swim"—perpetuate systemic racism

This transformative guide goes beyond theory to provide practical tools for lasting change. Whether you're beginning your journey in anti-racism work or seeking deeper insights for advocacy, Dr. Dibinga offers a clear path forward.

"Dr. Dibinga is his generation's Dr. Carter G. Woodson... [it] rises above the banalities of lies and racist platitudes that have existed for centuries. I predict it will be read and studied for generations to come."  —Joe Madison, "The Black Eagle" on SiriusXM Urban View

Perfect for:
- Educators and diversity professionals
- Corporate leaders and team managers
- Anyone committed to creating a more equitable society
- Book clubs and community discussion groups

What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By "writing beyond race," noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination.

In the spirit of previous classics like Outlaw Culture and Reel to Real, this new collection of compelling essays interrogates contemporary cultural notions of race, gender, and class. From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era.

An essential deep dive into absentee fatherhood, the obstacles and stigmas that exasperate it, the dads who want to reconnect with their children, and what it takes for families to start healing—from the co-founder of Fathers’ UpLift

“Dr. Daniels, one of the nation’s foremost experts on fatherhood and healthy families, has written a book that will help all of us show up for the fathers in our lives.”—Michael Wear

Young men of color want to be good dads, but it takes more than a strong will to make that desire a reality. Charles C. Daniels Jr., PhD, a therapist and the co-founder and CEO of Fathers’ UpLift, an organization that helps fathers reconnect with their kids, learned firsthand while serving primarily Black and Brown men that it’s possible for fathers to overcome the significant challenges to establishing a relationship with their kids after weeks, months, or even years of separation.

Present is an honest look at the complexities that accompany separation and the sometimes grueling effort it takes to overcome those barriers. Drawing on therapeutic practice and the experiences of thousands, Daniels describes what it takes for fathers to parent themselves, for families to practice forgiveness, and for fathers and communities to create support structures so that dads can navigate life transitions, relate better to the whole family, and heal from their own woundedness.

Daniels details systemic obstacles that disadvantage fathers and societal stigmas that make healing relationships with children challenging. But he shows that they aren’t the end of the story—it’s still possible to reestablish familial bonds. For young men and those who support them, and for those who are interested in the struggles these men and their children face, Present is a book of challenge and of hope, filled with stories from Daniels’s own life and the lives of the fathers he serves.

Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas enlarges upon two publications by the late Dr. Mamie McKnight’s organization, Black Dallas Remembered—First African American Families of Dallas (1987) and African American Families and Settlements of Dallas (1990). Our Stories is the history of Black citizens of Dallas going about their lives in freedom, as described by the late Eva Partee McMillan: “The ex-slaves purchased land, built homes, raised their children, erected their educational and religious facilities, educated their children, and profited from their labor.”

Our Stories brings together memoirs from many of Dallas’s earliest Black families, as handed down over the generations to their twentieth-century descendants. The period covered begins in the 1850s and goes through the 1930s. Included are detailed descriptions of more than thirty early Dallas communities formed by free African Americans, along with the histories of fifty-seven early Black families, and brief biographies of many of the early leaders of these Black communities.

The stories reveal hardships endured and struggles overcome, but the storytellers focus on the triumphs over adversity and the successes achieved against the odds. The histories include the founding of churches, schools, newspapers, hospitals, grocery stores, businesses, and other institutions established to nourish and enrich the lives of the earliest Black families in Dallas.

An anthology of original essays that examine white supremacy around the globe through the lens of anthropology

White supremacy, an entrenched global system that emerged alongside European colonialism, is based on presumed biological and cultural differences, racist practices, the hypervaluation of whiteness, and the devaluation of nonwhites. Anthropology has been shaped by—and has helped to shape—white supremacy, yet the discipline also offers powerful tools for understanding this system at a global scale. The Anthropology of White Supremacy gathers original essays from a diverse, international group of anthropologists to explore how this phenomenon works both within anthropology and in cultural and political structures around the world.

The book features historical and ethnographic analysis about Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Senegal, South Africa, and the United States, and addresses the ways white supremacy impacts a broad range of issues, including finance, advertising and media representations, militarism, police training, migration, and development.

The Anthropology of White Supremacy demonstrates not only how anthropology can help us to better comprehend white supremacy, but also how the discipline can help us begin to dismantle it.

The contributors include Omolade Adunbi, Samar Al-Bulushi, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Michael Blakey, Mitzi Uehara Carter, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Celina de Sa, Vanessa Diaz, Britt Halvorson, Faye Harrison, Sarah Ihmoud, Anthony R. Jerry, Darryl Li, Kristín Loftsdóttir, Christopher Loperena, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Jemima Pierre, Jean Muteba Rahier, Laurence Ralph, Renya K. Ramirez, Junaid Rana, Joshua Reno, Jonathan Rosa, Shalini Shankar, and Maria Styve.

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers.

Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven’t paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime.

While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences.

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

In the tradition of New York Times bestseller The World Without Us, Princeton and Yale scholar and notable activist Philip V. McHarris imagines what society would look like in a world without police.

It’s evident that policing is a problem. But what is the way best forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris reimagines the world without police to find answers and ask, How can we make police departments obsolete? Beyond Policing tackles thorny issues with evidence, including data and personal stories, to uncover the weight of policing on people and communities and the patterns that prove police reform only leads to more policing.

McHarris challenges us to envision a future where safety is not synonymous with policing but is built on the foundation of community support and preventive measures. He explores innovative community-based safety models (like community mediators and violence interrupters), the decriminalization of driving offenses, and the creation of nonpolice crisis response teams. McHarris also outlines strategies for responding to conflict and harm in ways that transform the conditions that give rise to the issues. He asks us to imagine a world where people thrive without the shadow of inequality, where our approach to safety is a collective achievement.

McHarris writes, “What if our response to crisis wasn’t about control but about care? How can we create conditions where safety is a shared responsibility? How can we design justice so that no community is routinely oppressed? Envisioning such a world isn’t just a daydream; it’s the first step toward building a society where violence and fear no longer dictate our lives.”

Transformative and forward thinking, Beyond Policing provides a blueprint for a brighter, safer world. McHarris’s vision is clear: we must dare to move beyond policing and foster a society where everyone has the resources to thrive and feel safe.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.

Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women's studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism. 

Featuring writing from eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Bravechallenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women’s studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences. 

As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as “the beginning of a new era, where the ‘women’ in women’s studies will no longer mean ‘white.’” 

Coeditors Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith are authors and former women's studies professors. Brittney C. Cooper is a professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of several books, including Eloquent Rage, named by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf read for November/December 2018.

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A conversation between 2 eminent Black thinkers on how to work together to make the world a better place despite deep religious differences

Brad Braxton and Anthony Pinn represent two traditions—Christianity and Secular Humanism respectively—that have for centuries existed in bitter opposition. For too long, people with different worldviews have disparaged and harmed one another. Instead of fighting each other, Braxton and Pinn talk with, listen to, and learn from one another. Their wide-ranging conversation demonstrates the possibility of fruitful exchange that accounts for—rather than masks—their differences.

Written amid the Covid-19 pandemic, threats to our democracy, and national protests for racial justice, A Master Class on Being Human shows us that constructive dialogue can help us pursue the common good without sacrificing our distinctive identities. In conversations that are frank, personal, and deeply informed by scholarship, Braxton and Pinn discuss topics that are urgent and immediate, such as the ongoing violence against Black communities, the rise of religiously unaffiliated communities, the Black Lives Matter movement. They also ponder those broader philosophical and theological questions that inform our politics and sense of what it means to be human: the meaning of religion, the stubborn dilemma of moral evil, the power and problems of hope.

Braxton and Pinn invite us to join them in a master class as they strive to create a world where differences are not tolerated but instead celebrated. In that kind of courageous classroom, all can learn how to be better people who in turn transform the world into a better place.

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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 Coates
• Tarana Burke
• Harry Belafonte
• Adrienne Maree brown
• Alicia Garza
• Patrisse Khan-Cullors
• Reverend Dr. Valerie Bridgeman
• Kiese Laymon
• Jamilah Lemieux
• Robin DG Kelley
• Damon Young
• Michael Arceneaux
• Hanif Abdurraqib
  
• Dr. Yaba Blay
  
• Diamond Stingily
  
• Amanda Seales
• Imani Perry
  
• Denene Millner
  
• Kierna Mayo
  
• John Jennings
  
• Dr. Joy Harden Bradford
  
• Tongo Eisen-Martin

Cancel culture addresses real harm...and sometimes causes more. It’s time to think this through.

“Cancel” or “call-out” culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous "Harper’s Letter,” signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to address harm and take down powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, call outs are seen by some as having gone too far. But what is “too far” when you’re talking about imbalances of power and patterns of harm? And what happens when people in social justice movements direct their righteous anger inward at one another?

In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond this impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes even from from its targets. However, brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn’t, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that reflect our values?

With an Afterword by Malkia Devich-Cyril.

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From preeminent LGBTQ scholar and journalist Steven Thrasher comes an exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: the relationship between viruses and inequality.

In March 2020, the COVID pandemic plunged the world into fear and chaos. People around the globe locked themselves in their houses and stocked up on food, fearing unemployment, the loss of loved ones, and an uncertain future. But as the weeks went on, one devastating truth began to emerge more prominently than any other: we were not all impacted by this virus the same way. While wealthier people could keep themselves safe by working from home and using food delivery, the marginalized members of society were left much more vulnerable. They held risky jobs as “Essential Workers,”; they did not have health insurance; they lost employment and the ability to afford housing and food; they were old and viewed as disposable; they were undocumented and afraid to go to the hospital; they were at far greater risk because of living with a disability. It quickly became startlingly clear the vast inequalities in who was able to survive the virus.

And yet for prominent scholar Steven Thrasher, none of this was a surprise. Having spent his ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher had seen first hand how viruses intersect with racism, capitalism, homophobia, and ableism. He knew that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology. And he had a term for it: the viral underclass.

In THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS, Dr. Thrasher will present, for the first time, his unified theory of one of the most pressing social justice issues of our time: how viruses expose the fault lines of society. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating COVID, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he develops his theory and lays bare its inner workings--all in an engaging, accessible, and personable voice. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE, Michelle Alexander’s THE NEW JIM CROW, and Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

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A riveting examination of racial violence in America that occurred in the late-1800s. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, by Ida B. Wells, is an exemplary investigative report that details a wave of brutal murders plaguing African Americans, particularly in the South.

A historical account of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. — New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, “the greatest democratic theorist of his generation” — takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.

Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America’s apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people.

The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it.

A revealing look at the identity and mission of the Black church

What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community’s fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the Black church in the United States.

For decades the Black church and Black theology have held each other at arm’s length. Black theology has emphasized the role of Christian faith in addressing racism and other forms of oppression, arguing that Jesus urged his disciples to seek the freedom of all peoples. Meanwhile, the Black church, even when focused on social concerns, has often emphasized personal piety rather than social protest. With the rising influence of white evangelicalism, biblical fundamentalism, and the prosperity gospel, the divide has become even more pronounced.

In The Divided Mind of the Black Church, Raphael G. Warnock, Senior Pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., traces the historical significance of the rise and development of Black theology as an important conversation partner for the Black church. Calling for honest dialogue between Black and womanist theologians and Black pastors, this fresh theological treatment demands a new look at the church’s essential mission.

A searing critique of medical racism and a powerful call for health-care professionals to make real change in their field, written by a leading activist and doctor

Unequal access to care. Misdiagnosis. Mistreatment. Medical gaslighting. An increasing number of studies show the profound impacts racism has on communities of color—particularly Black Americans. But these disparities in health care and wellbeing are not the result of a handful of uninformed or malicious doctors: racism in the medical system is institutional, woven into the very fabric of diagnostic criteria and even hospital infrastructure. Medicine denies fair treatment to Black patients not in error…but by design.

Drawing from extensive research, in-depth interviews with medical students and resident physicians, and over twenty-five years of experience as a medical doctor, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs argues that the reason racism in medicine continues to go unchecked is because it is in fact the standard of care. Any attempts to dismantle medical racism through “placebo” efforts such as forming diversity committees or releasing statements condemning racism will fail, she says, because they don’t address the reality of how the institution of Medicine has been, and continues to be, negligent when it comes to the treatment of Black people.

Dr. Grubbs skillfully unpacks the three core problems of how our health-care system currently considers the race of patients, which she identifies as being “race based,” “race disregarded,” and “race denied.”

* When medical diagnoses and trainings are race based, they lead doctors to make different treatment decisions for Black patients, and create a dangerous disadvantage.

* At the same time, medical textbooks and trainings may inappropriately disregard race in cases when it does matter, like failing to include pictures of how rashes may appear differently on light and dark skin—leading to misdiagnosis and death.

* And finally, many medical institutions still deny the extent to which racism is an issue at all, resulting in fewer Black physicians and disastrous outcomes for Black patients.

Calling on her medical colleagues to join her in working against the negligence of American medicine, Dr. Grubbs lays out a pathway to true equity and inclusion in health care: getting to the root of the underlying fears and insecurities that have led to racist medical negligence; recruiting and retaining a diverse physician workforce; and forcing Medicine to commit to the cultural humility necessary to rebuild, not just replaster, a broken institution.

Famously known as the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott, Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited helped shape the civil rights movement and changed our nation’s history forever.

In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900-1981) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower--it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God's justice prevail.

A new edition of a landmark work on Black women’s intellectual traditions.
 
An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century Black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in the light of new developments in current scholarship.

The FBI has made possible a reassembling of the history of Malcolm X that goes beyond any previous research. From the opening of his file in March of 1953 to his assassination in 1965, the story of Malcolm X’s political life is a gripping one.

Shortly after he was released from a Boston prison in 1953, the FBI watched every move Malcolm X made. Their files on him totaled more than 3,600 pages, covering every facet of his life. Viewing the file as a source of information about the ideological development and political significance of Malcolm X, historian Clayborne Carson examines Malcolm’s relationship to other African-American leaders and institutions in order to define more clearly Malcolm’s place in modern history.

With its sobering scrutiny of the FBI and the national policing strategies of the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X: The FBI File is one of a kind: never before has there been so much material on the assassination of Malcolm X in one conclusive volume.

Explodes the myth that self-hatred is the dominant theme in Black identity. This book, using a thorough review of social scientific literature on Negro identity conducted between 1936 and 1967, demonstrates that important themes of mental health and adaptive strength have been frequently overlooked by scholars, both Black and White.

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. “Luxury slaves” tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon known for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic subject, she considers the black dandy in relation to nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on black masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in contemporary visual art.

From the creator of “a unified field theory of racism” (NPR’s Planet Money), a dollars-and-cents reckoning of the state of Black America and a new framework to close the power gap

Historically, Black Americans’ quest for power has been understood as an attempt to gain equal protections under the law. But power in America requires more than basic democratic freedoms. It is inextricably linked with economic influence and ownership―of one’s self, home, business, and creations.

Andre M. Perry draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Ranging from property, business, and wealth to education, health, and social mobility, Black Power Scorecard moves across the country, evaluating people’s ability to set the rules of the game and calculating how that translates into the ultimate means of power―life itself, and the longevity of Black communities. Along the way, Perry identifies woefully overlooked areas of investment that could close the racial gap and benefit all.

An expansive take on power supported by documentation and data, Black Power Scorecard is a fresh contribution to the country’s reckoning with structural inequality, one that offers a new approach to redressing it.

A poignant, unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature—everywhere, if you know how to see it.

In Black Elegies, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief borne of sustained racial violence. Structured around the sensorial, the book moves through sight, sound, and touch to reveal what Okwui Enwezor calls the “national emergency of black grief.” With her characteristic literary skill, Brown analyzes the work of major figures including Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, Audre Lorde, and Marvin Gaye, among others.

Brown contemplates recognizable sites of mourning: forced migration and enslavement, bodily violations, imprisonment and death. And she examines sites that do not register immediately as archives of grief: the landscape of southern U.S. slave plantations, a spontaneous street party, a quilt constructed out of the clothing worn by a loved one, a dance performance to hold the memory of history, and an aeolian harp installed at an institute of European art, among others. In this, the book offers a framework of mourning while black, within the parameters of contemporary artistic production. Brown asks: How do you mourn those you are not supposed to see? And where does the grief go? She shows us that grief is everywhere: “It spills out of photographs and modulates music. It hovers in the tenor and tone of cinematic performances. It resides in the body like an inspired concept, waiting for its articulation.”

Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore,is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines.

Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.

New York Times-bestselling author adrienne maree brown knows we need each other more than ever, and offers “loving corrections”: a roadmap towards collective power, righting wrongs, and true belonging 

This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of “loving correction” rather than mere critique, author adrienne maree brown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable by setting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.

Loving Corrections is divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essays including “A Word for White People” and “Relinquishing the Patriarchy” and writing on topics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities. The second section expands and updates pieces from brown's popular monthly column “Murmurations” in YES! Magazine that explore accountability—within oneself and community—with depth, inventiveness, and empathy.

Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the “corrections” in the book’s title are intended to explore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountable from our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.

Building on her previous work—especially Holding Change and We Will Not Cancel Us—brown reminds us how much we need each other: "It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change."