History
- Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement
Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement
by David Fisher
$28.99The inspiring story of the Montgomery Bus boycott trial, which brought national attention to a young Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., told by King’s lawyer and friend, Fred Gray with New York Times bestselling authors Dan Abrams and David Fisher.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. After she was arrested and fined for her refusal, the African American community organized a bus boycott. Ninety-three people were jailed for breaking the city’s anti-boycott statute, but rather than trying all of them, the prosecutors chose to make an example of just one, a 27-year-old minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fred Gray, 24 years old and one of only two black lawyers in Montgomery, had represented Parks and now agreed to defend King in court. The stakes were huge: This was not just a trial about a city statute, this was an attempt to launch a movement in the face of an often-violent effort by a segregated Southern city to prevent them from succeeding. And it would set Gray on a path that would lead him to making an impassioned argument in front of the Supreme Court against segregation in Montgomery’s public transit.
Filled with Gray’s personal recollections as well as King’s own vivid courtroom testimony, this book transports readers to a key moment that is often said to have sparked the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and which introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to the world at large.
- Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions
Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions
by Etan Thomas
$18.95ETAN THOMAS, an eleven-year NBA veteran and lifelong advocate for social justice, weaves together his personal experiences with police violence and white supremacy with multiple interviews of family members of victims of police brutality like exonerated Central Park Five survivor Raymond Santana and Rodney King’s daughter Lora Dene King; as well as activist athletes and other public figures such as Steph Curry, Chuck D, Isiah Thomas, Sue Bird, Jake Tapper, Jemele Hill, Stan Van Gundy, Kyle Korver, Mark Cuban, Rick Strom, and many more.
Thomas speaks with retired police officers about their efforts to change policing, and white allies about their experiences with privilege and their ability to influence other white people. Thomas also examines the history of racism, white supremacy, and the prevalence of both in the current moment. He looks at the origins of white supremacy in the US, dating back to the country’s inception, and explores how it was interwoven into Christianity--interviewing leading voices both in and outside of the church. Finally, with prominent voices in the media and education, Thomas discusses the continued cultivation of these injustices in American society.
Police Brutality and White Supremacy demands accountability and justice for those responsible for and impacted by police violence and terror. It offers practical solutions to work against the promotion of white supremacy in law enforcement, Christianity, early education, and across the public sphere.
Featuring original interviews with: Steph Curry, Chuck D, Yamiche Alcindor, Isiah Thomas, Jemele Hill, Craig Hodges, Stan Van Gundy, Mark Cuban, Jake Tapper, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Sue Bird, Kyle Korver, Rick Strom, Cenk Uygur, Tim Wise, Chris Broussard, Breanna Stewart, Rex Chapman, Stephen Jackson, Kori Mccoy, Lora Dene King, Chikesia Clemons, Raymond Santana, Alissa Findley, Amber And Ashley Carr, Michelle And Ashley Monterrosa, Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., Abiodun Oyewole, Marc Lamont Hill, Officer Carlton Berkley, Pastor John K. Jenkins Sr., Officer Joe Ested, Captain Sonia Pruitt, and Bishop Talbert Swan.
- Southern History across the Color Line (2nd Edition) by Nell Irvin Painter
Southern History across the Color Line (2nd Edition) by Nell Irvin Painter
$24.95The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, we often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled. - Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
by C. Riley Snorton
$24.95Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018
Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018
Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018
Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018
Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible.
Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.
- The Black Presidency
The Black Presidency
by Michael Eric Dyson
$16.99Michael Eric Dyson dives deep into the true meaning of Barack Obama’s historic presidency and its effects on the changing landscape of race and blackness in America. How has race shaped Obama’s identity, career, and presidency? What can we learn from his major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?
Dyson was granted an exclusive interview with the president for this book, and Obama’s own voice shines through. Along with interviews with Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and others, this intimate access provides a unique depth to this engrossing analysis of the nation’s first black president, and how race shapes and will shape our understanding of his achievements and failures alike. - My Face Is Black Is True by Mary Frances Berry
My Face Is Black Is True by Mary Frances Berry
$16.95Acclaimed historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, demanded reparations for ex-slaves. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House (1861-1928) went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating story of a forgotten civil rights crusader: a woman who emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow
Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow
by Gerald Horne
$29.00The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and
economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North.Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, and the relative freedom they achieved helped bring down Jim Crow in the United States, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core.
Based on extensive research in Havana, Madrid, London, and throughout the U.S., Race to Revolution delves deep into the historical record, bringing to life the experiences of slaves and slave traders, abolitionists and sailors, politicians and poor farmers. It illuminates the complex web of interaction and influence that shaped the lives of many generations as they struggled over questions of race, property, and political power in both Cuba and the United States.
- The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
by Rachel L. Swarns
$28.00An urgent new chapter in the history of the Catholic Church and America’s reckoning with its founding narrative.
In 1838, a group of America's most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this powerful account, journalist, author and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to reveal the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion. The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape. The other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’ reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells a bigger story, demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the Catholic Church in America and bringing to light the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation. - Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962
Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962
by Lerone Bennett
$17.952018 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Reprint of the first edition of this landmark title. The black experience in America—starting from its origins in western Africa up to 1961—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 late 1950s to 1961, the time of publication. “Before the Mayflower” grew out of a series of articles Bennett published in Ebony magazine regarding "the trials and triumphs of a group of Americans whose roots in the American soil are deeper than the roots of the Puritans who arrived on the celebrated Mayflower a year after a 'Dutch man of war' deposited twenty Negroes at Jamestown." Bennett's history is infused with a desire to set the record straight about black contributions to the Americas and about the powerful Africans of antiquity. While not a fresh history, it provides a solid synthesis of current historical research and a lively writing style that makes it accessible and engaging reading. - Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
$20.00By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.
Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.
Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction. - Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy
Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy
by Clarence Lusane
$21.95Twenty Dollars and Change places Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy in a long tradition of resistance, illuminating the ongoing struggle to realize a democracy in which her emancipatory vision prevails.
America is in the throes of a historic reckoning with racism, with the battle for control over official narratives at ground zero. Across the country, politicians, city councils, and school boards are engaged in a highly polarized debate about whose accomplishments should be recognized, and whose point of view should be included in the telling of America’s history.
In Twenty Dollars and Change, political scientist Clarence Lusane, author of the acclaimed The Black History of the White House, writes from a basic premise: Racist historical narratives and pervasive social inequities are inextricably linked—changing one can transform the other. Taking up the debate over the future of the twenty-dollar bill, Lusane uses the question of Harriet Tubman vs. Andrew Jackson as a lens through which to view the current state of our nation's ongoing reckoning with the legacies of slavery and foundational white supremacy. He places the struggle to confront unjust social conditions in direct connection with the push to transform our public symbols, making it plain that any choice of whose life deserves to be remembered and honored is a direct reflection of whose basic rights are deemed worthy of protection, and whose are not.
- Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
by Loren Schweninger & John Hope Franklin
$24.95From John Hope Franklin, America's foremost African American historian, comes this groundbreaking analysis of slave resistance and escape. A sweeping panorama of plantation life before the Civil War, this book reveals that slaves frequently rebelled against their masters and ran away from their plantations whenever they could.
For generations, important aspects about slave life on the plantations of the American South have remained shrouded. Historians thought, for instance, that slaves were generally pliant and resigned to their roles as human chattel, and that racial violence on the plantation was an aberration. In this precedent setting book, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, significant numbers of slaves did in fact frequently rebel against their masters and struggled to attain their freedom. By surveying a wealth of documents, such as planters' records, petitions to county courts and state legislatures, and local newspapers, this book shows how slaves resisted, when, where, and how they escaped, where they fled to, how long they remained in hiding, and how they survived away from the plantation. Of equal importance, it examines the reactions of the white slaveholding class, revealing how they marshaled considerable effort to prevent runaways,
meted out severe punishments, and established patrols to hunt down escaped slaves.
Reflecting a lifetime of thought by our leading authority in African American history, this book provides the key to truly understanding the relationship between slaveholders and the runaways who challenged the system--illuminating as never before the true nature of the South's "most peculiar institution." - Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660
Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660
by John K. Thornton & Linda M. Heywood
$33.95This book shows that the first generation of Africans taken to English and Dutch colonies before 1660 were captured by pirates from these countries from slave ships coming from Kongo and Angola. This region had embraced Christianity and elements of Western culture, such as names and some material culture, the result of a long period of diplomatic, political, and military interaction with the Portuguese. This background gave them an important role in shaping the way slavery, racism, and African-American culture would develop in English and Dutch colonies throughout the Western Hemisphere.
- Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962
Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962
by Lerone Bennett Jr.
$22.95The black experience in America-starting from its origins in western Africa up to 1961-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 late 1950s to 1961, the time of publication. "Before the Mayflower" grew out of a series of articles Bennett published in Ebony magazine regarding "the trials and triumphs of a group of Americans whose roots in the American soil are deeper than the roots of the Puritans who arrived on the celebrated Mayflower a year after a 'Dutch man of war' deposited twenty Negroes at Jamestown." Bennett's history is infused with a desire to set the record straight about black contributions to the Americas and about the powerful Africans of antiquity. While not a fresh history, it provides a solid synthesis of current historical research and a lively writing style that makes it accessible and engaging reading. After discussing the contributions of Africans to the ancient world, "Before the Mayflower" tells the history of "the other Americans," how they came to America, and what happened to them when they got here. The book is comprehensive and detailed, providing little-known and often overlooked facts about the lives of black folks through slavery, Reconstruction, America's wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement. The book includes a useful time line and some fascinating archival images.
- The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
Sold outA New York Times bestseller: “This terrific new book . . . [explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.”—Boston Globe
Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events. - When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era
When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era
by Donovan X. Ramsey
$30.00A kaleidoscopic account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience—told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic
The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting work exposes the undeniable links between the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and the consequences we live with today—a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.
When Crack Was King follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack’s destruction and devastating legacy. Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a “crack house”; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and a sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and lastly, Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark's most legendary group of drug traffickers.
Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial re-evaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.
Noteworthy Discoveries- How the crack epidemic really began
- How both Democrats and Republicans failed urban America during the crack epidemic
- How Dr. Dre's The Chronic helped turn the page on the crack epidemic
- How young people of color ended the crack epidemic
- Why Joe Biden owes urban Americans an explanation for the crack epidemic
- Lessons from the crack epidemic for the opioid epidemic
- In Search of Sisterhood : Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement
In Search of Sisterhood : Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement
by Paula Giddings
Sold outThis history of the largest block women's organization in the United States is not only the story of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (DST), but also tells of the increasing involvement of black women in the political, social, and economic affairs of America. Founded at a time when liberal arts education was widely seen as either futile, dangerous, or impractical for blacks, especially women, DST is, in Giddings's words, a "compelling reflection of block women's aspirations for themselves and for society."
Giddings notes that unlike other organizations with racial goals, Delta Sigma Theta was created to change and benefit individuals rather than society. As a sorority, it was formed to bring women together as sisters, but at the some time to address the divisive, often class-related issues confronting black women in our society. There is, in Giddings's eyes, a tension between these goals that makes Delta Sigma Theta a fascinating microcosm of the struggles of black women and their organizations.
DST members have included Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Margaret Murray Washington, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, and, on the cultural side, Leontyne Price, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Judith Jamison, and Roberta Flack. In Search of Sisterhood is full of compelling, fascinating anecdotes told by the Deltas themselves, and illustrated with rare early photographs of the Delta women.
- "My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole": Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture
"My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole": Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture
by Robin L. Owens
$49.95*ships in 7-10 business days
US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Richard Nixon’s 1974 impeachment hearings. However, before she developed faith in the Constitution, Jordan had faith in Christianity. In “My Faith in the Constitution is Whole”: Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture, Robin L. Owens shows how Jordan turned her religious faith and her faith in the Constitution into a powerful civil religious expression of her social activism.
Owens begins by examining the lives and work of the nineteenth-century Black female orator-activists Maria W. Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper. Stewart and Cooper fought for emancipation and women’s rights by “scripturalizing,” or using religious scriptures to engage in political debate. Owens then demonstrates how Jordan built upon this tradition by treating the Constitution as an American “scripture” to advocate for racial justice and gender equality. Case studies of key speeches throughout Jordan’s career show how she quoted the Constitution and other founding documents as sacred texts, used them as sociolinguistic resources, and employed a discursive rhetorical strategy of indirection known as “signifying on scriptures.”
Jordan’s particular use of the Constitution—deeply connected with her background and religious, racial, and gender identity—represents the agency and power reflected in her speeches. Jordan’s strategies also illustrate a broader phenomenon of scripturalization outside of institutional religion and its rhetorical and interpretive possibilities.
- Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement
Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement
by Mark Whitaker
$29.99Journalist and author Mark Whitaker explores the momentous year that redefined the civil rights movement as a new sense of Black identity expressed in the slogan “Black Power” challenged the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis.
In gripping, novelistic detail, Saying It Loud tells the story of how the Black Power phenomenon began to challenge the traditional civil rights movement in the turbulent year of 1966. Saying It Loud takes you inside the dramatic events in this seminal year, from Stokely Carmichael’s middle-of-the-night ouster of moderate icon John Lewis as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to Carmichael’s impassioned cry of “Black Power!” during a protest march in rural Mississippi. From Julian Bond’s humiliating and racist ouster from the Georgia state legislature because of his antiwar statements to Ronald Reagan’s election as California governor riding a “white backlash” vote against Black Power and urban unrest. From the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, to the origins of Kwanzaa, the Black Arts Movement, and the first Black studies programs. From Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ill-fated campaign to take the civil rights movement north to Chicago to the wrenching ousting of the white members of SNCC.
Deeply researched and widely reported, Saying It Loud offers brilliant portraits of the major characters in the yearlong drama, and provides new details and insights from key players and journalists who covered the story. It also makes a compelling case for why the lessons from 1966 still resonate in the era of Black Lives Matter and the fierce contemporary battles over voting rights, identity politics, and the teaching of Black history. - Black Jack: The Ballad of Jack Johnson
Black Jack: The Ballad of Jack Johnson
by Charles R. Smith
$8.99*ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days
This nonfiction picture book tells the story of the world's first black heavyweight champion, the charismatic Jack "Black Jack" Johnson.
Born as Arthur John Johnson in the southern state of Texas, Jack Johnson was one of the most renowned boxers of the twentieth century. Through hard work and persistence, he climbed the ranks, taking a swing and a jab and eventually busting the color barrier. As the first Black man to win the Heavyweight Championship, there was more than a title on the line.
Published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this history-making bout (July 4, 1910). This is an extraordinary marriage of poetry, fabulous collage artwork, and a splendid achievement in its own right. - Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
by Saidiya Hartman
$20.00The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated.
Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded, with a new foreword, afterword, and illustrations—her singular talents and analytical framework are turned toward the “terrible spectacle” of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of violence, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. Through unmasking the hidden and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers.
- Shirley Chisholm Dared: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress by Alicia D. Williams
Shirley Chisholm Dared: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress by Alicia D. Williams
$17.99Discover the inspiring story of the first black woman elected to Congress and to run for president in this picture book biography from a Newbery Honor-winning author and a Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award-winning illustrator.
Meet Shirley, a little girl who asks way too many questions! After spending her early years on her grandparents' farm in Barbados, she returns home to Brooklyn and immediately makes herself known. Shirley kicks butt in school; she breaks her mother's curfew; she plays jazz piano instead of classical. And as a young adult, she fights against the injustice she sees around her, against women and black people. Soon she is running for state assembly...and winning in a landslide. Three years later, she is on the campaign trail again, as the first black woman to run for Congress. Her slogan? "Fighting Shirley Chisholm--Unbought and Unbossed!" Does she win? You bet she does. - Mobilizing Black Germany
Mobilizing Black Germany
by Tiffany N. Florvil
$26.95In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism. - Black Ghost Of Empire
Black Ghost Of Empire
by Kris Manjapra
$26.99To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts society today, we must not only look at what slavery was, but also the unfinished way it ended. One may think of “emancipation” as a finale, leading to a new age of human rights and universal freedoms. But in reality, emancipations everywhere were incomplete. In Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipation—explaining them in chronological order—along with the lasting impact these transitions had on formerly enslaved groups around the Atlantic.
Kris Manjapra was born in the Caribbean of mixed African and Indian parentage. He grew up in Canada and completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard. He has lived in the USA ever since. He is a professor of history at Tufts University, and a recipient of the 2015 Emerging Scholar Award by Diverse magazine. He has held fellowships at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and at UCLA. The author of Black Ghost of Empire, he has also written Colonialism in Global Perspective, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire, M.N. Roy: Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Marxism, and Cosmopolitan Thought Zones of South Asia. - The Negro in the Making of America by Benjamin Quarles
The Negro in the Making of America by Benjamin Quarles
$24.99The 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." - Crusade for Justice
Crusade for Justice
by Ida B. Wells
$20.00“She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the history of the country.”—Alfreda M. Duster
Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.
This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells’s private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster. - Jim Crow's Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership
Jim Crow's Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership
by Leslie T. Fenwick
$34.00Jim Crow’s Pink Slip exposes the decades-long repercussions of a too-little-known result of resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education decision: the systematic dismissal of Black educators from public schools.
In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ended segregated schooling in the United States, but regrettably, as documented in congressional testimony and transcripts, it also ended the careers of a generation of highly qualified and credentialed Black teachers and principals. In the Deep South and northern border states over the decades following Brown, Black schools were illegally closed and Black educators were displaced en masse. As educational policy and leadership expert Leslie T. Fenwick deftly demonstrates, the effects of these changes stand contrary to the democratic ideals of an integrated society and equal educational opportunity for all students.
Jim Crow’s Pink Slip provides a trenchant account of how tremendous the loss to the US educational system was and continues to be. Despite efforts of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations, congressional hearings during the Nixon administration, and antiracist activism of the 21st century, the problems fomented after Brown persist. The book draws the line from the past injustices to problems that the educational system grapples with today: not simply the underrepresentation of Black teachers and principals, but also salary reductions, teacher shortages, and systemic inequality.
By engaging with the complicated legacy of the Brown decision, Fenwick illuminates a crucial chapter in education history. She also offers policy prescriptions aimed at correcting the course of US education, supporting educators, and improving workforce quality and diversity. - Slavery and the African American Story: The African American Story
Slavery and the African American Story: The African American Story
by Patricia Williams Dockery
$8.99Until now, you've only heard one side of the story: how slavery began, and how America split itself in two to end it. Here's the true story of America from the African American perspective.
From the moment Africans were first brought to the shores of the United States, they had a hand in shaping the country. Their labor created a strong economy, built our halls of government, and defined American society in profound ways. And though the Emancipation Proclamation wasn't signed until 300 years after the first Africans arrived, the fight for freedom started the moment they set foot on American soil.
This book contains the true narrative of the first 300 years of Africans in America: the struggles, the heroes, and the untold stories that are left out of textbooks. If you want to learn the truth about African American history in this country, start here. - PRE-ORDER: Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond
PRE-ORDER: Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond
by Bethonie Butler
$35.00PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: December 5, 2023
With iconic imagery and engrossing text, Black TV is the first book of its kind to celebrate the groundbreaking, influential, and often under-appreciated shows centered on Black people and their experiences from the last fifty years.
Over the past decade, television has seen an explosion of acclaimed and influential debut storytellers including Issa Rae (Insecure), Donald Glover (Atlanta), and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You). This golden age of Black television would not be possible without the actors, showrunners, and writers that worked for decades to give voice to the Black experience in America.
Written by veteran TV reporter Bethonie Butler, Black TV tells the stories behind the pioneering series that led to this moment, celebrating the laughs, the drama, and the performances we’ve loved over the last fifty years. Beginning with Julia, the groundbreaking sitcom that made Diahann Carroll the first Black woman to lead a prime-time network series as something other than a servant, she explores the 1960s and 1970s as an era of unprecedented representation, with shows like Soul Train, Roots, and The Jeffersons. She unpacks the increasingly nuanced comedies of the 1980s from 227 to A Different World, and how they paved the way for the ’90s Black-sitcom boom that gave us The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Living Single. Butler also looks at the visionary comedians—from Flip Wilson to the Wayans siblings to Dave Chappelle—and connects all these achievements to the latest breakthroughs in television with showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay, and Quinta Brunson leading the charge.
With dozens of photographs reminding readers of memorable moments and scenes, Butler revisits breakout performances and important guest appearances, delivering some overdue accolades along the way. So, put on your Hillman sweatshirt, make some popcorn, and get ready for a dyn-o-mite retrospective of the most groundbreaking and entertaining shows in television history. - PRE-ORDER: America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy
PRE-ORDER: America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy
by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
$35.00PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: November 14, 2023
The remarkable story of how African Americans transformed Atlanta, the former heart of the Confederacy, into today’s Black mecca
Atlanta is home to some of America’s most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in 1861, Atlanta was a final contender to be the capital of the Confederacy. Sixty years later, long after the Civil War, it was the Ku Klux Klan’s sacred “Imperial City.”
America’s Black Capital chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. America’s Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds, with effects that reached far beyond Georgia, shaping the nation’s popular culture, public policy, and politics. - PRE-ORDER: Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design
PRE-ORDER: Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design
by Kaleena Sales
$27.50A rich, inclusive, contemporary, and global look at design diversity, past and present, through essays, interviews, and images curated by design educator and advocate Kaleena Sales.
PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: October 24, 2023
As the design industry reexamines its emphasis on Eurocentric ideologies and wrestles with its conventional practices, Centered advocates for highlighting and giving a voice to the people, places, methods, ideas, and beliefs that have been eclipsed or excluded by dominant design movements.
Curated by Kaleena Sales, a powerful voice and noted advocate for diversity in the design community, the thirteen essays and interviews in this volume feature important and underrepresented design work and projects, both historical and present-day, including:
- Gee’s Bend Quilters, by Stephen Child and Isabella D’Agnenica
- A Chinese Typographic Archive, by YuJune Park and Caspar Lam
- Indigenous Sovereignty and Design: An Interview with Sadie Red Wing (Her Shawl is Yellow)
- The Truck Art of India, by Shantanu Suman
- New Lessons from the Bauhaus: An Interview with Ellen Lupton
- Vocal Type: An Interview with Tré Seals
- Decolonizing Graphic Design, A Must, by Cheryl D. Miller
- And more
Filled with striking visuals from a range of global designers, Centered is a must-read and must-have for design practitioners, educators, students, and anyone interested in expanding narratives and gaining a more inclusive understanding of design diversity and its impact on culture. - PRE-ORDER: Cuba: A Brief History
PRE-ORDER: Cuba: A Brief History
by Sergio Guerra Vilaboy
$15.95PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: October 17, 2023
A Spanish-language edition of a concise, engaging, and thoroughly revised overview of Cuba written by Cubans for anyone interested in quickly understanding the island country’s turbulent history.
Un conciso, ameno resumen de Cuba para cualquiera interesado en comprender rápidamente la turbulenta historia de este país insular.
Cuba: A Brief History covers the pre-Hispanic period, through Cuba’s struggle to maintain the revolution in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the period after Fidel Castro’s decision to step down from office, to the 2014 opening to Cuba by the Obama Administration, the retirement of Raul Castro and his replacement as president in 2018 by Miguel Diaz Canal, and finally to the reversal of Washington’s engagement with Cuba under President Trump. This slim volume provides the reader with an overview of the history and politics of the tiny Caribbean island that continues to appear at the center of world events.
Featuring a presentation and analysis of US intervention on the island, Cuba: A Brief History also includes footnotes and a bibliography for further reading. This is an essential introduction to Cuba for students, visitors, and others looking for a bird’s eye view of the turbulent history of the island that has captivated and enthralled its northern neighbors for decades.
Cuba: Una Breve Historia abarca el período prehispánico, la lucha de Cuba por mantener viva la revolución en los años siguientes al colapso de la Unión Soviética, el período luego de la decisión de Fidel Castro de ceder su puesto, la apertura de Cuba en el 2014 a la Administración de Obama, la jubilación de Raúl Castro y su reemplazo por Miguel Díaz-Canel como presidente en el 2018, y la revocación de parte del presidente Trump del compromiso de Washington con Cuba. Este corto volumen provee al lector con un pantallazo de la historia y la política de la pequeña isla caribeña que continúa siendo el foco de sucesos mundiales.
Incluye una presentación y análisis de la intervención estadounidense en la isla, Cuba: Una Breve Historia también incluye notas al pie y una bibliografía de lecturas complementarias. Esta es una introducción esencial a Cuba para estudiantes, turistas y todo aquel que desea un vistazo de pájaro de la turbulenta historia de la isla que ha cautivado y fascinado a sus vecinos del norte hace décadas.
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