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  • "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

    by Mark Whitaker

    from $19.99
    Journalist 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

    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.

  • Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity

    by Charles Price

    $30.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Illuminates how the Rastafari movement managed to evolve in the face of severe biases


    Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, their political and religious significance minimized. But they have not been vanquished.

    Charles Price’s Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity reclaims the rich history of this relatively new world religion. Charting its humble and rebellious roots in Jamaica’s backcountry in the late nineteenth century to the present day, Price explains how Jamaicans’ obsession with the Rastafari wavered from campaigns of violence to appeasement and cooptation. Indeed, he argues that the Rastafari as a political, religious, and cultural movement survived the biases and violence they faced through their race consciousness and uncanny ability to ride the waves of anti-colonialism and Black Power.

    This social movement traveled throughout the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, and the United States, capturing the heart and imagination of much of the African diaspora. Rastafari spans the movement’s struggle for autonomy, its multiple campaigns for repatriation to Africa, and its leading role in the Black consciousness movements of the twentieth century. Not satisfied with simply narrating the past, Rastafari also takes on the challenges of gender equality and the commodification of Rastafari culture in the twenty-first century without abandoning its message of equality and empowering the downpressed.

    Rastafari shows how this cultural and political context helped to shape the development of a Black collective identity, demonstrating how Rastafarians confronted society-wide ridicule and oppression and emerged prouder and more united, steadfast in their conviction that they were a chosen people.

  • Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

    by Saidiya Hartman

    $20.00

    The 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.

  • Mobilizing Black Germany

    by Tiffany N. Florvil

    $26.95

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    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

    by Kris Manjapra

    Sold out

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    To 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
    $24.99

    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."

  • 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.
  • Deep South : A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (2nd Edition)

    Allison Davis

    $20.00
    A classic examination of the lived realities of American racism, now with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson.
     
    First published in 1941, Deep South is a landmark work of anthropology, documenting in startling and nuanced detail the everyday realities of American racism. Living undercover in Depression-era Mississippi—not revealing their scholarly project or even their association with one another—groundbreaking Black scholar Allison Davis and his White co-authors, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, delivered an unprecedented examination of how race shaped nearly every aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States. Their analysis notably revealed the importance of caste and class to Black and White worldviews, and they anatomized the many ways those views are constructed, solidified, and reinforced.

    This reissue of the 1965 abridged edition, with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson—who acknowledges the book’s profound importance to her own workproves that Deep South remains as relevant as ever, a crucial work on the concept of caste and how it continues to inform the myriad varieties of American inequality.

  • From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism)
    $24.00

    In the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse range of storefronts―including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers―brought the work of the New Left, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism, and other movements into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. By the middle of the 1970s, thousands of these enterprises operated across the United States―but only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits.

    Vividly portraying the struggles, successes, and sacrifices of these unlikely entrepreneurs, From Head Shops to Whole Foods writes a new history of social movements and capitalism by showing how activists embraced small businesses in a way few historians have considered. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Joshua Clark Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business, while also showing how today’s companies have adopted the language―but not often the mission―of liberation and social change.

  • PRE-ORDER: Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age
    $30.00

    PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: July 16, 2024

    The never-before-told story of the women Egyptologists who paved the way of exploration in Egypt and created the basis for Egyptology.

    The history of Egyptology is often told as yet one more grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and the precious artifacts for their competing homelands. But that is only half of the story. During the so-called Golden Age of Exploration, there were women working and exploring before Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Before men even conceived of claiming the story for themselves, women were working in Egypt to lay the groundwork for all future exploration.

    In Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Kathleen Sheppard brings the untold stories of these women back into this narrative. Sheppard begins with some of the earliest European women who ventured to Egypt as travelers: Amelia Edwards, Jenny Lane, and Marianne Brocklehurst. Their travelogues, diaries and maps chronicled a new world for the curious. In the vast desert, Maggie Benson, the first woman granted permission to excavate in Egypt, met Nettie Gourlay, the woman who became her lifelong companion. They battled issues of oppression and exclusion and, ultimately, are credited with excavating the Temple of Mut.

    As each woman scored a success in the desert, she set up the women who came later for their own struggles and successes. Emma Andrews’ success as a patron and archaeologist helped to pave the way for Margaret Murray to teach. Margaret’s work in the university led to the artists Amice Calverley’s and Myrtle Broome’s ability to work on site at Abydos, creating brilliant reproductions of tomb art, and to Kate Bradbury’s and Caroline Ransom’s leadership in critical Egyptological institutions. Women in the Valley of the Kings upends the grand male narrative of Egyptian exploration and shows how a group of courageous women charted unknown territory and changed the field of Egyptology forever.

  • Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad
    $28.00

    New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • An award-winning author charts the poignant global journeys of African Americans as she explores her own transatlantic family odyssey in Beyond the Shores, a powerful history of living abroad while Black.
     
    “By exploring the life of Black expats, creatives, and activists, Beyond the Shores enhances the stories of migration to reveal how race is lived in the United States and abroad.”—Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of South Side Girls

    Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven stories highlight African Americans’ complicated relationship to the United States and the world at large.
     
    Beyond the Shores is not just about where African Americans stayed or where they ate when they traveled but also about why they left in the first place and how they were treated once they reached their destinations. Drawing on years of research, Dr. Tamara J. Walker chronicles their experiences in atmospheric detail, taking readers from well-known capital cities to more unusual destinations like Yangiyul, Uzbekistan, and Kabondo, Kenya. She follows Florence Mills, the would-be Josephine Baker of her day, in Paris, and Richard Wright, the author turned actor and filmmaker, in Buenos Aires. Throughout Beyond the Shores, she relays tender stories of adventurous travelers, including a group of gifted Black crop scientists in the 1930s, a housewife searching for purpose in the 1950s, a Peace Corps volunteer discovering his identity in the 1970s, and her own grandfather, who, after losing his eye fighting in World War II and returning to a country that showed no signs of honoring his sacrifice, set out with his wife and children on a circuitous journey that sent them back and forth across the Atlantic. Tying these tales together is Walker’s personal account of her family’s, and her own, experiences abroad—in France, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, and beyond.
     
    By sharing the accounts of those who escaped the racism of the United States to try their hands at life abroad, Beyond the Shores shines a light on the meaning of home and the search for a better life.

  • PRE-ORDER: Hip-Hop Is History
    $30.00

    PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: June 11, 2024

    Hip-Hop Is History is a book only Questlove could have written: a perceptive and personal reflection on the first half-century of hip-hop.

    When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn’t expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Award–winning musician, an Academy Award–winning filmmaker, a New York Times bestselling author, a producer, an entrepreneur, a cofounder of one of hip-hop’s defining acts (the Roots), and the genre’s unofficial in-house historian.

    In this landmark book, Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove skillfully traces the creative and cultural forces that made and shaped hip-hop, highlighting both the forgotten but influential gems and the undeniable chart-topping hits—and weaves it all together with the stories no one else knows. It is at once an intimate, sharply observed story of a cultural revolution and a sweeping, grand theory of the evolution of the great artistic movement of our time. And Questlove, of course, approaches it with not only the encyclopedic fluency and passion of an obsessive fan but also the expertise and originality of an innovative participant.

    Hip-hop is history, and also his history.

  • The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
    $22.99

    A New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller!

    An acclaimed, timely narrative of how people of faith have historically--up to the present day--worked against racial justice. And a call for urgent action by all Christians today in response.

    The Color of Compromise is both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don't know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. You will be guided in thinking through concrete solutions for improved race relations and a racially inclusive church.

    The Color of Compromise:

    * Takes you on a historical, sociological, and religious journey: from America's early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War
    * Covers the tragedy of Jim Crow laws, the victories of the Civil Rights era, and the strides of today's Black Lives Matter movement
    * Reveals the cultural and institutional tables we have to flip in order to bring about meaningful integration
    * Charts a path forward to replace established patterns and systems of complicity with bold, courageous, immediate action
    * Is a perfect book for pastors and other faith leaders, students, non-students, book clubs, small group studies, history lovers, and all lifelong learners

    The Color of Compromise is not a call to shame or a platform to blame white evangelical Christians. It is a call from a place of love and desire to fight for a more racially unified church that no longer compromises what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality. A call that challenges black and white Christians alike to standup now and begin implementing the concrete ways Tisby outlines, all for a more equitable and inclusive environment among God's people. Starting today.

  • Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought
    $32.00

    How creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and feel through the artistic work of Black women
     
    Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.
     
    Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.

  • Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
    $39.99

    The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.

    Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.

    Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.

    Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

    After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.

  • Freedom! The Story of the Black Panther Party
    $12.99

    Booklist Editors’ Choice

    WINNER of the Russell Freedman Award for Non-Fiction for a Better World
    WINNER – International Literacy Association (ILA) – Young Adult Nonfiction
    HONOR – 2023 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights
    Top 10 – In the Margins Book Award
    Editor’s Choice - Booklist

    Knowledge is power. The secret is this. Knowledge, applied at the right time and place, is more than power. It’s magic.
     
    That’s what the Black Panther Party did. They called up this magic and launched a revolution.
     
    In the beginning, it was a story like any other. It could have been yours and it could have been mine. But once it got going, it became more than any one person could have imagined.
     
    This is the story of Huey and Bobby. Eldridge and Kathleen. Elaine and Fred and Ericka.
     
    This is the story of the committed party members. Their supporters and allies. The Free Breakfast Program and the Ten Point Program. It’s about Black nationalism, Black radicalism, about Black people in America.
     
    From the authors of the acclaimed book, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, and introducing new talent Jetta Grace Martin, comes the story of the Panthers for younger readers—meticulously researched, thrillingly told, and filled with incredible photographs throughout.

    P R A I S E

    ★  “A passionate, honest, and intimate look into an important time in civil rights history.”
    —Booklist (starred)

    ★ “Impeccable writing and stellar design make this title highly recommended.”
    —School Library Journal (starred)

    “Detailed, thoroughly researched...A valuable addition to the history of African American resistance.”
    —Kirkus

  • PRE-ORDER: I've Been to the Mountaintop

    by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    $22.99

    PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: July 2, 2024

    A beautiful commemorative edition of Dr. Martin Luther King's last speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop," part of Dr. King's archives published exclusively by HarperCollins.

    On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit of Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, and delivered what would be his final speech. Voiced in support of the Memphis Sanitation Worker’s Strike, Dr. King's words continue to be powerful and relevant as workers continue to organize, unionize, and strike across various industries today. Withstanding the test of time, this speech serves as a galvanizing call to create and maintain unity among all people.

    This beautifully designed hardcover edition presents Dr. King’s speech in its entirety, paying tribute to this extraordinary leader and his immeasurable contribution, and inspiring a new generation of activists dedicated to carrying on the fight for justice and equality.

  • Cinema Speculation

    by Quentin Tarantino

    $21.00

    The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino.

    In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans—and all movie lovers—could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT’s and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.

  • Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema

    by Odie Henderson

    Sold out

    A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema—the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre—from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism

    In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that would help define the decade. Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, an independently produced film about a male sex worker who beats up cops and gets away, and Gordon Parks’s Shaft, a studio-financed film with a killer soundtrack, were huge hits, making millions of dollars. Sweetback upended cultural expectations by having its Black rebel win in the end, and Shaft saved MGM from bankruptcy. Not for the last time did Hollywood discover that Black people went to movies too. The Blaxploitation era was born.

    Written by film critic Odie Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a spirited history of a genre and the movies that he grew up watching, which he loves without irony (but with plenty of self-awareness and humor). Blaxploitation was a major trend, but it was never simple. The films mixed self-empowerment with exploitation, base stereotypes with essential representation that spoke to the lives and fantasies of Black viewers. The time is right for a reappraisal, understanding these films in the context of the time, and exploring their lasting influence.

  • History Comics: Hip-Hop: The Beat of America

    by Jarrett Williams

    $12.99
    Turn back the clock with History Comics! In this volume, witness the birth of hip-hop and learn how this musical genre became a cultural revolution.

    From its humble origins at house parties in the Bronx, where DJs mixed old records to create new sounds, charismatic MCs let their clever lyrics flow, and B-boys and B-girls pioneered inventive dance moves, hip-hop quickly became a musical and cultural revolution.

    In this volume of History Comics, we follow Aaliyah, a hip-hop superfan who is about to get a lesson in all things “old school” courtesy of her dad. The pair take a day trip to the Bronx, where Aaliyah discovers the many unsung
    heroes who helped create the foundations of hip-hop. So get ready to drop the beat, bust a move, and get down with some fresh rap knowledge!

  • Coretta: The Autobiography of Mrs. Coretta Scott King

    by Coretta Scott King

    $18.99

    Celebrate the life of the extraordinary civil and human rights activist Coretta Scott King with this picture book adaptation of her critically acclaimed adult memoir.

    This is the autobiography of Coretta Scott King—the founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and a singular twentieth-century American civil and human rights activist. Learn about how a girl born in the segregated Deep South became a global leader at the forefront of the peace movement and an unforgettable champion of social change. Resilience, bravery, and joy lie at the center of this timeless story about fighting for justice against all odds.

  • Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom for All

    by Deborah G. Plant

    $28.99

    A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America’s obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times–bestselling Barracoon.


    Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American’s personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans—including author Deborah Plant’s brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on the history of slavery in America—are deprived of these basic freedoms every day.

    In her studies of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant became fascinated by Hurston’s explanation for the atrocities of the international slave trade. In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote: “But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.” We look the other way when the basic human rights of marginalized and stigmatized groups are violated and desecrated, not realizing that only the practice of justice everywhere secures justice, for any of us, anywhere.

    An active vigilance is required of those who would be and remain free; with Of Greed and Glory, Deborah Plant reveals the many ways in which slavery continues in America today and charts our collective course toward personal sovereignty for all.

  • PRE-ORDER: A Child's Introduction to Asian American and Pacific Islander History: The Heroes, the Stories, and the Cultures that Helped to Build America

    by Naomi Hirahara

    $21.99

    PRE-ORDER: On Sale Date: April 9, 2024

    The perfect primer for kids ages 8-12, A Child's Introduction to Asian American and Pacific Islander History is packed with remarkable stories, groundbreaking events, and inspirational people, that have made a lasting impact on the history and culture of the United States.

    The latest entry in the award-winning Child’s Introduction series is an inspirational and essential look at the impact and influence that AAPI peoples have made to the culture of the United States. The book is packed with profiles of dozens of AAPI trailblazers from from all walks of life, including political activist Grace Lee Boggs, Vice President Kamala Harris, actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and dozens of others who have made contributions to music, food, sciences, technology, and more. Kids will learn key terms like "Asian American" and "Pacific Islander," how to pronounce common Asian names,  and the discrimination members of the community have faced (and continue to face). They will be introduced to a wide variety of traditions, from Diwali to Lunar New Year and signature dishes, like poi and pho, all giving greater visibility to Asian Americans for young learners. 
     
    Featuring charming illustrations and a lively design, as well as a pull-out poster, A Child's Introduction to Asian American and Pacific Islander History is much-needed addition every home library and classroom.

  • HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience

    by Ayesha Rascoe

    $29.00

    In this joyous collection of essays about historically Black colleges and universities, alumni both famous and up-and-coming write testimonials about the schools and experiences that shaped their lives and made them who they are today.

    Edited by the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Ayesha Rascoe—with a distinguished and diverse set of contributors including Oprah Winfrey, Stacey Abrams, and Branford Marsalis, HBCU Made illuminates and celebrates the experience of going to a historically Black college or university. This book is for proud alumni, their loved ones, current students, and anyone considering an HBCU.

    The first book featuring famous alumni sharing personal accounts of the Black college experience, HBCU Made offers a series of warm, moving, and candid personal essays about the schools that nurtured and educated them. The contributors write about how they chose their HBCU, their first days on campus, the dynamic atmosphere of classes where students were constantly challenged to do their best, the professors who devoted themselves to the students, the marching bands and majorettes and their rigorous training.

    For some, the choice to attend an HBCU was an easy one, as they followed in the footsteps of their parents or siblings. For others, it was a carefully considered step away from a predominantly white institution to be educated in a place where they would never have to justify their presence. And for some authors here, it was an HBCU that took them in and cared for them like family, often helping them to overcome a rough patch.

    For all, the pride in their choice is abundantly clear. HBCU Made is a perfect gift for each generation of prospective students and brand new alumni to come.

  • Beyond Vietnam

    by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    $22.99

    A beautiful commemorative edition of Dr. Martin Luther King's speech "Beyond Vietnam,” part of Dr. King's archives published exclusively by HarperCollins.

    At New York City's Riverside Church in 1967, Dr. King stood in front of a rapt audience and criticized the Vietnam War as a destructive act of force and a cruel manipulation of the poor—for those fighting on either side. He urged Americans to confront the harsh realities of war and consequently pursue a path where everyone is presented a choice, in his words, "a choice of nonviolent coexistence instead of violent coannihilation.”

    This beautifully designed hardcover edition presents Dr. King’s speech in its entirety, paying tribute to this extraordinary leader and his immeasurable contribution, and inspiring a new generation of activists dedicated to carrying on the fight for justice and equality.

  • African Icons: Ten People Who Shaped History

    by Tracey Baptiste

    $9.99

    In this expansive collection of history, meet ten real-life kings, queens, inventors, scholars, and visionaries who lived in Africa thousands of years ago and changed the world.

    Black history begins thousands of years ago with the many cultures and people of the African continent. Through portraits of ten heroic figures, bestselling author Tracey Baptiste takes readers on an empowering, energetic journey through time to meet some of the great leaders and thinkers whose vision built nations and shaped the course of history:

    • Menes: Creator of Dynasties
    • Merneith: A Queen Erased
    • Imhotep: From Peasant to God
    • Aesop: The Wisest Man in the Ancient World
    • Hannibal Barca: Unparalleled Military Strategist
    • Terence: North African Playwright
    • Amanirenas: Warrior, Diplomat, Queen
    • Tin Hinan: Founder of a City on the Dunes
    • Mansa Musa: The Richest Man of All Time
    • Queen Idia: Kingmaker

    Illustrator Hillary D. Wilson's brilliant portraits accompany each profile, along with vivid, information-filled landscapes, maps, and graphics for readers to pore over and return to again and again. This rich and thrilling work, which celebrates Black excellence and provides an essential correction to Eurocentric tellings of history, will enthrall readers of all ages.

    “In African Icons, Baptiste engages in the hard work of unveiling the myths about the African continent to young readers . . . This is a great beginner’s guide to pre-colonial Africa.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist  

  • A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

    by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    $29.99
    The major collection of King’s essential writings and speeches, now newly packaged to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the “I Have A Dream” speech

    “We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis’s Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968. “But it really doesn’t matter to me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

    These prophetic words, uttered the day before King’s assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his “promised land” of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last 12 years of his life. These words and others are commemorated here in the only major one-volume collection of this seminal twentieth-century American prophet’s writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King Jr.’s essential thoughts on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.


  • Coretta Scott

    by Ntozake Shange

    $17.99
    An extraordinary portrait of the Civil Rights pioneer—from an award-winning team

    Walking many miles to school in the dark, young Coretta Scott knew too well the unfairness of life in the segregated south. Her yearning for equality began to grow, and together with Martin Luther King Jr., she led a most courageous journey—toward freedom and equality for all.

    This powerful prose-poem by Ntozake Shange is spectacularly illustrated by Kadir Nelson. Coretta Scott honors one of the world’s most inspiring leaders.

  • Let the Children March

    by Monica Clark-Robinson

    $17.99
    Told from a child's point of view, this moving historical picture book focuses on a monumental moment in the civil rights movement: the Children’s Crusade of 1963. Thousands of African American children and teens marched through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama to end segregation and to inspire change and hope for the future. Written by debut author Monica Clark-Robinson and illustrated by Coretta Scott King Honor-winning artist Frank Morrison. 


    I couldn't play on the same playground as the white kids. 
    I couldn't go to their schools.  
    I couldn't drink from their water fountains.  
    There were so many things I couldn't do. 
    In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, thousands of African American children volunteered to march for their civil rights after hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. They protested the laws that kept black people separate from white people. Facing fear, hate, and danger, these children used their voices to change the world. Frank Morrison's emotive oil-on-canvas paintings bring this historical event to life, while Monica Clark-Robinson's moving and poetic words document this remarkable time. 
  • I Have a Dream - 60th Anniversary Edition

    by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    $19.99

    With new forewords and an afterword by Martin Luther King III, Dr. Bernice A. King, and Dexter Scott King

    A beautiful collectible edition celebrating the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s legendary speech at the March on Washington, part of Dr. King’s archives published exclusively by HarperCollins.

    On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before thousands of Americans who had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in the name of civil rights. Including the immortal words, “I have a dream,” Dr. King’s keynote speech would energize a movement and change the course of history.

    With references to the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, Shakespeare, and the Bible, Dr. King’s March on Washington address has long been hailed as one of the greatest pieces of writing and oration in history. Profound and deeply moving, it is as relevant today as it was sixty years earlier.

    This beautifully designed edition presents Dr. King’s speech in its entirety, paying tribute to this extraordinary leader and his immeasurable contribution, and inspiring a new generation of activists dedicated to carrying on the fight for justice and equality. 

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