Mic check! Learn how to rhyme with beloved rap duo Kid ‘n Play in the Legends of Hip-Hop board book series.

In this accessible series perfectly crafted for babies (and adult fans), music producer Pen Ken and three-time Emmy Award–nominated animation director Saxton Moore introduce mini emcees to some of hip-hop’s biggest and brightest luminaries with fun facts about each rapper, organized by a teachable concept.

In this book, children will meet iconic duo Kid ‘n Play and learn all about rhymes!

Check out other books in the series, including Legends of Hip-Hop: 2Pac, Legends of Hip-Hop: Queen Latifah, and Legends of Hip-Hop: Biggie Smalls.

A new history of US education through the nineteenth century that rigorously accounts for Black, Native, and white experiences; a story that exposes the idea of American education as “the great equalizer” to not only be a lie, but also a myth that reproduces past harms.

Education is the epicenter of every community in the United States. Indeed, few institutions are as pivotal in shaping our lives and values than public schools. Yet the nature of schooling has become highly politicized, placing its true colors on full display—a battleground where clashes over free speech and book bans abound, and where the suppression of knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality have taken center stage. Political forces are waging a war on academic freedom, raising serious questions. What gets taught, how, by whom, and who gets to decide? Yet, how might our perception of this reality shift when we recognize such battles as expressions of a relationship between race, power, and schooling as old as the country itself?

Access and equity in public education have long been discussed and attempts to address the educational debts owed to historically oppressed groups have taken the form of modern innovations and promises of future improvement. Yet the past plays an equally significant role in structuring our present reality—and in the case of our education system, there is a dark, unexamined history that continues to influence how schools forge our world.

Harvard University professor Jarvis R. Givens, an expert in the fields of American Educational History and African American Studies, draws on his own personal experiences and academic expertise to unveil how the political-economic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people played an essential role in building American education as an inequitable system premised on white possession and white benefit. In doing so, he clarifies that present conflicts are not merely culture wars, but indeed structural in nature. American Grammar is a revised origin story that exposes this legacy of racial domination in schooling, demonstrating how the educational experiences of Black, white, and Native Americans were never all-together separate experiences, but indeed relational, all part of an emergent national educational landscape. Givens reveals how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students; how funds from the US War Department developed native boarding schools; and how classroom lessons socialized students into an American identity grounded in antiblackness and anti-Nativeness, whereby the substance of schooling mirrored the very structure of US education.  

In unraveling this past, Givens provides more honest language for those working to imagine and build a truly more egalitarian future for all learners and communities, and especially those most vulnerable among us.

Featuring more than 100 artists, this landmark book charts the intricate connections between photography and the Black Arts Movement
 
The Black Arts Movement brought together writers, filmmakers, and visual artists who were exploring ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. This book examines the vital role of photography in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, revealing how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture.
 
Works by Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Samuel Fosso, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Gordon Parks, Juan Sánchez, Robert A. Sengstacke, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among dozens of other celebrated and underappreciated artists, span documentary and fashion photography, portraiture, collage, installation, performance, and video. Pictured luminaries include Miles Davis, Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Malcolm X, and many more. The book’s essays by distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism. Taking an expansive approach, the authors consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora and the dynamic interchange of pan-African ideas that propelled the movement. Authoritative and beautifully illustrated, this is the definitive volume on photography and the Black Arts Movement.
 
Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
(September 21, 2025–January 4, 2026)
 
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
(February 24–May 24, 2026)
 
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
(July 25–November 1, 2026)

"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."

So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America—not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.

Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.
 
Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.
 
Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.

In Global Yorùbá, renowned scholar Toyin Falola covers the history, people, traditions, environment, religion, spirituality, cosmology, culture, and philosophy of one of Africa's largest cultural groups, the Yorùbá, all while considering the people's relationship with their immediate and distant neighbors.

Falola examines how the Yorùbán people have adapted to their environment and tapped it to (re)invent their civilization, shape their culture and traditions, and inform their socioeconomic relations with their neighbors. These interactions have guided the Yorùbá philosophy that developed over time, expressing their conviction regarding society's evolution and the place that humans occupy within it. This web of knowledge can present a more coherent account than any other text yet produced regarding Yorùbá civilization.

This volume demonstrates how global dynamics have been adopted in the creation of a Yorùbá community across different times and spaces.

A beautiful and moving testament to the enduring life of Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality.

When Kobe and Gianna Bryant died, tragically and unexpectedly, in 2020, the world mourned with a wholehearted ferocity. In perhaps the largest and most intense outpouring of public art the world has ever seen, murals went up on seemingly every available wall in Los Angeles and around the globe. The paintings were both professional and amateur, some public and some private, many of them colossal. All of them expressed love and respect for Kobe and Gianna Bryant as athletes, as a father and daughter, as heroes who will not be forgotten.

In Mamba & Mambacita Forever, Vanessa Bryant brings together the images and stories of more than a hundred murals honoring her husband and daughter. Taken together, what emerges is the story of a man who became even more than he himself could have imagined, an avatar of determination, discipline, and competitiveness. He was also a worldwide icon, one of the greatest athletes of our time, a man committed to his family and to fatherhood. Kobe was a figure of transformation and hope.

Mamba & Mambacita Forever ensures that the legacy of Kobe and Gianna Bryant will live on even after the most monumental murals themselves have all crumbled.

A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him―the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.

In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.

In A Thousand Ways to Die, Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy.

From the forest to the pharmacy, the bush to the medicine bottle, explore how plants and traditional practices from the Caribbean have traveled around the world to help heal people of all cultures.

For millennia, people have utilized plants as foods, medicines, hallucinogens, clothing, shelter, perfumes, dyes, and even poisons. In the Caribbean, medicinal and practical use of plants began with its first inhabitants, the Amerindians. New plants and knowledge were introduced through both triangular trade with Asia, Africa, and Europe and the enslavement of Africans and Indians from Southeast Asia, culminating in the modern-day system of Caribbean herbalism.

Caribbean Herbalism tells the rich and complex stories of Caribbean people and the plants that have sustained them. Inside you’ll find:

* A practical guide to a meaningful selection of herbs and their traditional uses
* Botanical field notes and drawings that tell the stories of the Indigenous, African, East Indian, and European plants that inhabit the region
* Culturally important traditions, remedies, and recipes
* Interviews with Caribbean people
* And so much more

This book offers practical tools you need to build a relationship with plants and make common Caribbean herbal remedies like bush teas, bush baths, herbal wines, infused alcohols and oils, and more!

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.

The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.

Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War’s aftermath and the legacy of racism in America

Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction—and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow.

Black Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book,” a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage.

Presented in a handsome and authoritative hardcover edition prepared by Foner and co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Reconstruction is joined here for the first time with important writings that trace Du Bois’s thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the tortured course of democracy in America.

Follow a day in the life of a young Black child and learn the different ways we experience love every day with this striking illustrated children’s book.

Created in 1993, Black Love Day is celebrated annually on February 13. This holiday was created to demonstrate love, forgiveness, and acceptance among Black people. Throughout the course of a day, a young boy observes and experiences many different kinds of Black love—the romantic love between his parents, the familial love of his siblings and family, the admiration for a teacher at school, the respect for community leaders, and more. 
 
Celebrate Black love, culture, and achievements by implementing the five tenets:

1. Love toward the Creator
2. Love toward Self
3. Love toward Family
4. Love within the Black Community
5. Love for the Black race

Black Joy is an inspiring story showcasing how these tenets can be used every day throughout the year to express love, gratitude, and positivity for everything in life.

In less than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat went from being a teenage graffiti artist to an international art star. His meteoric rise to fame coincided with the outrageous excess of the heady ’80s art boom. A fixture of the downtown scene, with its explosive mix of music, fashion, art, and drugs, he soon became involved with some of its most celebrated personalities, including Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Madonna. 

Basquiat fulfilled that cynical aphorism: Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. But Basquiat did more than that: he left a beautiful corpus. With each passing year, the remarkable energy, perspicacity and originality of his work increases in power. 

In a world where Black Lives Matter and the imperative need for diversity are among the driving forces of our time, Basquiat’s success in the 1980s white art world, and his ongoing universal celebrity, have made him a significant role model for generation of artists to come. 

From the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, to the East Village art scene, to the art dealers and out-of-control auction houses, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, the definitive biography of the young painter, is a vivid portrait of both the artist and his time. 

Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art includes 12-14 photographs.

Historian and civil rights activist proves how progressive movements can flourish even in conservative times.

Despair and mourning after the election of an antagonistic or polarizing president, such as Donald Trump, is part of the push-pull of American politics. But in this incisive book, historian Mary Frances Berry shows that resistance to presidential administrations has led to positive change and the defeat of outrageous proposals, even in challenging times. Noting that all presidents, including ones considered progressive, sometimes require massive organization to affect policy decisions, Berry cites Indigenous peoples’ protests against the Dakota pipeline during Barack Obama’s administration as a modern example of successful resistance built on earlier actions.

Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Berry discusses that president’s refusal to prevent race discrimination in the defense industry during World War II and the subsequent March on Washington movement. She analyzes Lyndon Johnson, the war in Vietnam, and the antiwar movement and then examines Ronald Reagan’s two terms, which offer stories of opposition to reactionary policies, such as ignoring the AIDS crisis and retreating on racial progress, to show how resistance can succeed.

The prochoice protests during the George H. W. Bush administration and the opposition to Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, as well as his budget cuts and welfare reform, are also discussed, as are protests against the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act during George W. Bush’s presidency. Throughout these varied examples, Berry underscores that even when resistance doesn’t achieve all the goals of a particular movement, it often plants a seed that comes to fruition later.

Berry also shares experiences from her six decades as an activist in various movements, including protesting the Vietnam War and advocating for the Free South Africa and civil rights movements, which provides an additional layer of insight from someone who was there. And as a result of having served in five presidential administrations, Berry brings an insider’s knowledge of government.

History Teaches Us to Resist is an essential book for our times which attests to the power of resistance. It proves to us through myriad historical examples that protest is an essential ingredient of politics, and that progressive movements can and will flourish, even in perilous times.

Booker T. Washington’s famous 1901 memoir, Up From Slavery, charts Washington’s rise from an enslaved child with a passion for learning to the nation’s most prominent Black educator and first president of Tuskegee University. A tireless advocate for Black economic independence, Washington attempted to balance his public acceptance of segregation with behind-the-scenes lobbying against voter disenfranchisement and financing anti–Jim Crow court cases. His memoir is both a crucial American document and an exercise in understanding the “double consciousness” coined by W.E.B. DuBois, himself one of Washington’s most vocal critics.

Tracing five centuries of exploitation in Latin America, a classic in the field, now in its twenty fifth year

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.
This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende’s inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

Texas Southern University is often said to have been “conceived in sin.” Located in Houston, the school was established in 1947 as an “emergency” state-supported university for African Americans, to prevent the integration of the University of Texas. Born to Serve is the first book to tell the full history of TSU, from its founding, through the many varied and defining challenges it faced, to its emergence as a first-rate university that counts Barbara Jordon, Mickey Leland, and Michael Strahan among its graduates.

Merline Pitre frames TSU’s history within that of higher education for African Americans in Texas, from Reconstruction to the lawsuit that gave the school its start. The case, Sweatt v. Painter, involved student Heman Marion Sweatt, who was denied entry to the University of Texas Law School because he was black. Pitre traces the tortuous measures by which Texas legislators tried to meet a provision of the state’s constitution that called for the establishment and maintenance of a “branch university for the instruction of colored youths of the State.” When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that the UT Law School’s efforts to remain segregated violated the U.S. Constitution, the future of the institution that would become Texas Southern University in 1951 looked doubtful.

In its early years the university persevered in the face of state neglect and underfunding and the threat of merger. Born to Serve describes the efforts, both humble and heroic, that faculty and staff undertook to educate students and turn TSU into the thriving institution it is today: a major metropolitan university serving students of all races and ethnicities from across the country and throughout the world.

Launched during the early civil rights movement, TSU has a history unique among historically black colleges and universities, most of which were established immediately after the Civil War. Born to Serve adds a critical chapter to the history of education and integration in the United States.

In Stigma and Culture, J. Lorand Matory provocatively shows how ethnic identification in the United States—and around the globe—is a competitive and hierarchical process in which populations, especially of historically stigmatized races, seek status and income by dishonoring other stigmatized populations. And there is no better place to see this than among the African American elite in academia, where he explores the emergent ethnic identities of African and Caribbean immigrants and transmigrants, Gullah/Geechees, Louisiana Creoles, and even Native Americans of partly African ancestry.  
           
Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life—while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity—also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others—alongside stories from his own life in academia—Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony
 
From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are invisible.

Praise for Forty Million Dollar Slaves
 
“A provocative, passionate, important, and disturbing book.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant . . . a beautifully written, complex, and rich narrative.”—Washington Post Book World
 
“A powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.”—Los Angeles Times

From the author of The Sword and the Shield, this definitive biography of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael offers "an unflinching look at an unflinching man" (Daily Beast). 

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century. 

A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.

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Offering a revolution in Black business financing, this book centers the entrepreneur and responds to the systemic failures surrounding Black wealth building.

There is a huge racial wealth gap in America today. Owning a business is one of the best ways to build wealth—but entrepreneurs need capital. And investing in Black companies is obstructed by systemic racism and implicit biases that continue to create barriers to success.

Merging historical information and data, along with tactical examples and explanations, this practical guide shows us what needs to be done in order to change the way we support Black companies and how we think about wealth.

Norwood calls for investors to move away from extractive, individualistic, exploitative approaches to capital and entrepreneurship. She asks us to move toward transformational, restorative, regenerative, and interdependent relationships to repair the impacts of systemic racism. Investors, large and small, need to say to Black business owners, “we believe in you.”

With an entrepreneur-centric approach, Believe-In-You Money challenges the system failure surrounding Black companies. It’s a guide on how Black entrepreneurs can be supported in sustainable ways and offers a shift in the way we think about who can be an investor, while aiming to change our personal relationships with money.

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.

An exploration of how emergent strategies can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures.

Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.

Drawing on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate, and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism—and the cataclysms to come. Rooted in analysis of current abolitionist practices and interviews with on-the-ground organizers resisting state violence, building networks to support people in need of abortion care, and nurturing organizations and convergences that can grow transformative cities and movements, Practicing New Worlds takes readers on a journey of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and imagination to dream the worlds we long for into being. 

After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.

Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster’s book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner’s first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black “bros” Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like—and who gets to love it.

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Uncovers the influence of Yoruba culture on women’s religious lives and leadership in religions practiced by Yoruba people

Women in Yoruba Religions examines the profound influence of Yoruba culture in Yoruba religion, Christianity, Islam, and Afro-Diasporic religions such as Santeria and Candomblé, placing gender relations in historical and social contexts. While the coming of Christianity and Islam to Yorubaland has posed significant challenges to Yoruba gender relations by propagating patriarchal gender roles, the resources within Yoruba culture have enabled women to contest the full acceptance of those new norms.

Oyeronke Olademo asserts that Yoruba women attain and wield agency in family and society through their economic and religious roles, and Yoruba operate within a system of gender balance, so that neither of the sexes can be subsumed in the other. Olademo utilizes historical and phenomenological methods, incorporating impressive data from interviews and participant-observation, showing how religion is at the core of Yoruba lived experiences and is intricately bound up in all sectors of daily life in Yorubaland and abroad in the diaspora.

A wise and beautifully designed collection of poetry, essays, and meditations meant to guide the reader into reflecting on the periods of unfolding in their own lives.

In order to let something in,

you have to let some things go

In order to heal, you must hurt,

In order to grow, you will experience discomfort

and all of this is to make more room for hope

less room for perfectionism and more room for simply being.

Less room for answers,

more room for questions with integrity

for mystery and wonder that leads you somewhere new

not right or wrong, good or bad

This is the Unfolding

The Unfolding is a gateway to change that gives you permission to breathe, change, and grow. Arielle Estoria shares the story of her own transformation in poems that were birthed from seasons of hurt and discomfort—from single to engaged, from Baptist pastor’s kid to student and explorer of the wonder and unanswered aspects of faith, from broken to restored—as she became the person she was meant to be.

The process of unfolding happens over and over again, helping you to grow, to expand, to peel away the layers of who you’ve been, mesh them with who you will be, and step into the fullness and wholeness of who you are.