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  • Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies

    edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    $19.95
    "The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." —Colin Kaepernick

    Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.

    Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others.

    Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back.

    To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all—through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.
  • Passed on: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial
    $26.95

    Passed On is a portrait of death and dying in twentieth-century African America. Through poignant reflection and thorough investigation of the myths, rituals, economics, and politics of African American mourning and burial practices, Karla FC Holloway finds that ways of dying are just as much a part of black identity as ways of living. Gracefully interweaving interviews, archival research, and analyses of literature, film, and music, Holloway shows how the vulnerability of African Americans to untimely death is inextricably linked to how black culture represents itself and is represented.

    With a focus on the “death-care” industry—black funeral homes and morticians, the history of the profession and its practices—Holloway examines all facets of the burial business, from physicians, hospital chaplains, and hospice administrators, to embalming- chemical salesmen, casket makers, and funeral directors, to grieving relatives. She uses narrative, photographs, and images to summon a painful history of lynchings, white rage and riot, medical malpractice and neglect, executions, and neighborhood violence. Specialized caskets sold to African Americans, formal burial photos of infants, and deathbed stories, unveil a glimpse of the graveyards and burial sites of African America, along with burial rituals and funeral ceremonies.
    Revealing both unexpected humor and anticipated tragedy, Holloway tells a story of the experiences of black folk in the funeral profession and its clientele. She also reluctantly shares the story of her son and the way his death moved her research from page to person.
    In the conclusion, which follows a sermon delivered by Maurice O. Wallace at the funeral for the author’s son, Bem, Holloway strives to commemorate—through observation, ceremony, and the calling of others to remembrance and celebration.

  • The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

    edited by Camilla Hawthorne & Jovan Scott Lewis

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    The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated.

    The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.

    Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne

  • Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas

    edited by Yolanda Covington-Ward & Jeanette S. Jouili

    $29.95
    The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and negotiation of social relationships and collective identities throughout the Black diaspora.

    The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent.

    Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne
  • Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

    by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    $20.00
    By 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.
  • Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900–1930

    by Timothy E. Nelson

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    Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted aboutthirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the township’s storywhere it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexico’s Northern Frontier.Dr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneersdevelop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown.

    “Blackdom” started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-centuryAfrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Blackinstitutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903,thirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy decision, formed the BlackdomTownsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, wherethey were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws.

    Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However,new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued toexist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdom’s boomtimes,in December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from aregenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson hasuncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newlydiscovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualizeduntil now.

    Reoriented to Mexico’s “northern frontier,” oneobserves Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons whocolonized as part of the transmogrification of Indigenous spaces into theAmerican West. Nelson’s concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a “Turnerian West,”but it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian “Borderland.” Its history highlightsa brief period and space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdom’scivic presence was not lengthy, its significance—and that of the Afro-Frontier—isan important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness, and thenotion of an American West.
  • Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies

    by Elizabeth McHenry

    $31.95
    Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded.

     

    Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women's clubs--which flourished during the 1890s--encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey's book club.

  • To Make Negro Literature : Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship

    by Elizabeth McHenry

    $28.95
    Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.

    In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.
  • There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life

    by Jafari S. Allen

    $31.95
    Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of Black queer politics, culture, and history in the 1980s as they emerged out of radical Black lesbian activism and writing.

    In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.
  • In and Out of This World : Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam

    by Stephen C. Finley

    $26.95
    Stephen C. Finley offers a new look at the religious practices and discourses of the Nation of Islam, showing how the group and its leaders used multiple religious and esoteric symbols to locate black bodies as sites of religious meaning.

    With In and Out of This World Stephen C. Finley examines the religious practices and discourses that have shaped the Nation of Islam (NOI) in America. Drawing on the speeches and writing of figures such as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammad, and Louis Farrakhan, Finley shows that the NOI and its leaders used multiple religious symbols, rituals, and mythologies meant to recast the meaning of the cosmos and create new transcendent and immanent black bodies whose meaning cannot be reduced to products of racism. Whether examining how the myth of Yakub helped Elijah Muhammad explain the violence directed at black bodies, how Malcolm X made black bodies in the NOI publicly visible, or the ways Farrakhan’s discourses on his experiences with the Mother Wheel UFO organize his interpretation of black bodies, Finley demonstrates that the NOI intended to retrieve, reclaim, and reform black bodies in a context of antiblack violence.
  • Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

    by E. Patrick Johnson

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    Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.

    Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

  • Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities

    by Veronica Davis

    $32.00

    Transportation planners, engineers, and policymakers in the US face the monumental task of righting the wrongs of their predecessors while charting the course for the next generation. This task requires empathy while pushing against forces in the industry that are resistant to change. How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? How do you change a system that continues to divide communities and cede to the automobile?

    In Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, transportation expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering. She calls for new thinking and more diverse leadership to create transportation networks that connect people to jobs, education, opportunities, and to each other.

    Inclusive Transportation is a vision for change and a new era of transportation planning. Davis explains why centering people in transportation decisions requires a great shift in how transportation planners and engineers are trained, how they communicate, the kind of data they collect, and how they work as professional teams. She examines what “equity” means for a transportation project, which is central to changing how we approach and solve problems to create something safer, better, and more useful for all people.

    Davis aims to disrupt the status quo of the transportation industry. She urges transportation professionals to reflect on past injustices and elevate current practice to do the hard work that results in more than an idea and a catchphrase.

    Inclusive Transportation is a call to action and a practical approach to reconnecting and shaping communities based on principles of justice and equity.

  • But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies

    edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, & Barbara Smith

    $24.95
    *ship in 7-10 business days

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

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

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

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

  • Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1ST ed.)

    Mary Frances Berry & John W. Blassingame

    $109.99
    A survey of Afro-American history is organized around the themes of the family and church, sex and racism, politics, education, criminal justice, and Black nationalism
  • Children of Fire: A History of African Americans

    by Thomas C. Holt

    $30.00

     

    *ships in 7 - 10 business days*
    "The first survey of African American history to rival From Slavery to Freedom." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

     

    Ordinary people don't experience history as it is taught by historians. They live across the convenient chronological divides we impose on the past. The same people who lived through the Civil War and the eradication of slavery also dealt with the hardships of Reconstruction, so why do we almost always treat them separately? In this groundbreaking new book, renowned historian Thomas C. Holt challenges this form to tell the story of generations of African Americans through the lived experience of the subjects themselves, with all of the nuances, ironies, contradictions, and complexities one might expect.


  • Ideas in Unexpected Places : Reimagining Black Intellectual History

    by Leslie M. Alexander, Brandon R. Byrd & Russell Rickford

    $34.95
    This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history.
     
    The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.
     
    Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses—and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.
  • Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation

    by Loren Schweninger & John Hope Franklin

    $24.95

    From 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

    by John K. Thornton & Linda M. Heywood

    $33.95

    This 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

    by Lerone Bennett Jr.

    $22.95

    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. 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.

  • My People : Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives

    by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

    $21.99

    From a legendary Emmy Award–winning journalist comes a collection of ground-breaking reportage from across five decades, vividly chronicling the experience of Black life in America yesterday and today.

    “Charlayne Hunter-Gault is that rarest of historical figures. . . . The essays collected here affirm her status as one of the most consistently original, insightful, and passionate interpreters of both American and African society, politics, and culture. Her thoughtful reflections, delightfully written and deeply engaging, are a testament both to her unique position in the history of journalism and to her status as an acute and keen commentator, reminding us how and why ‘race matters.’ This book is a must-read for all students of race in our times.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    At just eighteen years old, in January 1961, Charlayne Hunter-Gault made national news when she mounted a successful legal challenge that culminated in her admission to the University of Georgia—making her one of the first two Black students to integrate the institution. As an adult, Charlayne switched from being the subject of news to covering it, becoming one of its most recognized and acclaimed interpreters.

    Over more than five decades, this dedicated reporter charted a course through some of the world’s most respected journalistic institutions, including the New Yorker and the New York Times, where she was often the only Black woman in the newsroom. Throughout her storied career, Charlayne has chronicled the lives of Black people in America—shining a light on their experiences and giving a glimpse into their community as never before.

    My People showcases Charlayne’s lifelong commitment to reporting on Black people in their totality, “in ways that are recognizable to themselves.” Spanning from the civil rights movement through the election and inauguration of America’s first Black president and beyond, this invaluable collection shows the breadth and nuance of the Black experience through the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of everyday lives.

  • Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality

    by Tanya Katerí Hernández

    $24.95

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    The first comprehensive book about anti-Black bias in the Latino community that unpacks the misconception that Latinos are “exempt” from racism due to their ethnicity and multicultural background

    Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.

    By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.

  • Spoken Word: A Cultural History by Joshua Bennett
    $30.00
    A fascinating history of the art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion

    In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s. In this book, he goes back to its roots, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algarín, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero; the rapid growth of the "slam" format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; and Bennett's own journey alongside his older sister, whose work to promote the form helped shape spaces online and elsewhere dedicated to literature and the pursuit of human freedom.    

    A celebration of voices outside the dominant cultural narrative, who boldly embraced an array of styles and forms and redefined what—and whom—the mainstream would include, Bennett's book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.
  • Unearthing Joy : A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning by Gholdy Muhammad
    $35.99
    In this follow-up to Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad adds a fifth pursuit—joy—to her groundbreaking instructional model. She defines joy as more than celebration and happiness, but also as wellness, beauty, healing, and justice for oneself and across humanity. She shows how teaching from cultural and historical realities can enhance our efforts to cultivate identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and-indeed-joy for all students, giving them a powerful purpose to learn and contribute to the world. Dr. Muhammad's wise implementation advice is paired with model lessons and assessment tools that span subjects and grade levels.
  • Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

    by Charlene Carruthers

    $14.95

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    A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.

    Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.

  • Blacks and Jews in America : An Invitation to Dialogue

    by Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau

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    A Black-Jewish dialogue lifts a veil on these groups’ unspoken history, changing a narrative often dominated by the Grand Alliance and its fracturing. By engaging this history from our country’s origins to the present, Blacks and Jews in America models the honest and searching conversation needed for Blacks and Jews to forge a new understanding.

    A Black-Jewish dialogue lifts a veil on these groups’ unspoken history, shedding light on the challenges and promises facing American democracy from its inception to the present

    In this uniquely structured conversational work, two scholars—one of African American politics and religion, and one of contemporary American Jewish culture—explore a mystery: Why aren't Blacks and Jews presently united in their efforts to combat white supremacy? As alt-right rhetoric becomes increasingly normalized in public life, the time seems right for these one-time allies to rekindle the fires of the civil rights movement.

    Blacks and Jews in America investigates why these two groups do not presently see each other as sharing a common enemy, let alone a political alliance. Authors Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau consider a number of angles, including the disintegration of the “Grand Alliance” between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era, the perspective of Black and Jewish millennials, the debate over Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

    Ultimately, this book shows how the deep roots of the Black-Jewish relationship began long before the mid-twentieth century, changing a narrative dominated by the Grand Alliance and its subsequent fracturing. By engaging this history from our country’s origins to its present moment, this dialogue models the honest and searching conversation needed for Blacks and Jews to forge a new understanding.

  • Of Black Study

    by Joshua Meyers

    $26.95
    An exploration of the ways that Black intellectuals arrived at a critique of Western knowledge

    Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom.

    Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge. 

    Especially geared toward understanding the contemporary evolution of Black Studies in the neoliberal university and allows us to consider the stakes of intellectual freedom and the path toward a new world. 
  • In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love : Precarity, Power, Communities

    by Joy James

    $16.00
    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    Violence is arrayed against me because I’m Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
  • A Master Class on Being Human: A Black Christian and a Black Secular Humanist on Religion, Race, and Justice

    by Brad Braxton & Anthony Pinn

    $28.95

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

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

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

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

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

  • Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America

    by Linda Villarosa

    $18.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days

    From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation.

    In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.

    Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.

  • Let This Radicalize You : Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

    by Mariame Kaba

    Sold out

    What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

    Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

    The book is intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

  • Soil

    by Camille T. Dungy

    $28.99
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    A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

    In Soil: The Story of a Black Mothers Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

    In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

    Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
  • On Critical Race Theory : Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

    by Victor Ray

    $18.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    As our institutions and systems creak under the pressure of entrenched racism, renowned scholar Dr. Victor Ray explains how Critical Race Theory upholds truth amid misinformation to transcend backlash and uplift progress. On Critical Race Theory illustrates the centrality of race in American history and politics, and how the often mischaracterized intellectual movement became a political necessity.

    Dr. Ray draws upon the radical thinking of giants such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois to clearly trace the foundations of Critical Race Theory in the Black intellectual traditions of emancipation and the civil rights movement. From this foundation, Dr. Ray explores the many facets that CRT interrogates, from deeply embedded structural racism to the historical connection between Whiteness and property, ownership, and more.

    Dr. Ray argues that multicultural democracy is a recent and relatively fragile innovation that is under threat, in the face of the erosion of voting rights and attacks on speech at universities nationwide. He calls on readers to recall that it took the intervention of the National Guard to integrate schools as recently as 1960, that codifying racial subjugation has become the norm, and that populist demagoguery deployed racial insecurities to stir the January 6th insurrection and threaten the fabric of democracy.

    In succinct and thoughtful essays, Dr. Ray explores how the conversation on CRT has expanded into the contemporary popular consciousness, showing why Critical Race Theory matters and why we all should care.

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