A landmark study of twentieth-century Black picture magazines and their impact on Black American life

From the late 1930s through the early 1970s, national publications such as Our World, Sepia, Color, Elegant, Flash, Brown, and Ebony framed emerging definitions of success for Black middle-class audiences. These magazines featured dynamic photo essays, sometimes by photographers as renowned as Gordon Parks and Moneta Sleet Jr., that shaped perspectives on Black cultural life and influenced the way millions of Americans understood the world through photography.

This history of Black picture magazines and their contribution to American photography, journalism, and cultural production is the first to consider these publications through a visual and scholarly lens. It features more than 250 illustrations, essays by prominent curators and thinkers, and thematic contributions by celebrity experts, including

• Tina Beyoncé Knowles, businesswoman and House of Deréon fashion designer, on beauty culture
• Doug Glanville, sports journalist and former MLB player, on sports
• Carla J. Williams, photographer and 2025 Guggenheim fellow, on pulp pinups
• Jason Moran, jazz musician and MacArthur “genius” award-winner, on music
• TAYLOR ALXNDR, activist and performer, on drag and queer/trans representation

With a comprehensive list of Black picture magazines and the photographers whose work appeared in them, this volume will serve as both a foundational reference and a compelling visual history that reveals the profound role these publications played in defining and circulating images of Black life, achievement, and aspiration in the United States.

Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Exhibition Schedule:

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(February 28 to May 31, 2027)

Portland Museum of Art, Maine
(October 8, 2027, to January 9, 2028)

New Orleans Museum of Art
(May 11 to August 6, 2028)

A truly groundbreaking exploration of the lessons learned from the basketball GOAT, Michael Jordan, from those who competed with and against him

REFLECTIONS ON MICHAEL JORDAN―the true GOAT of men’s basketball―often center around his six championships with the Chicago Bulls. There has been remarkably little in-depth coverage of his two years with the Washington Wizards at the tail end of his NBA career. Lessons from Michael Jordan is a fascinating exploration of this surprisingly fertile, influential, and largely ignored period in MJ’s life.

This volume is a conversation―a collection of personal reflections, raw insights, and lived moments shared by the people who actually played alongside Michael Jordan, learned from him, competed against him, and saw him up close during this time in his career. Lessons from Michael Jordan includes twenty-three interviews (an homage to the #23 on MJ’s jersey) conducted by Etan Thomas, with Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Jerry Stackhouse, Phil Chenier, Kwame Brown, Jahidi White, Chamique Holdsclaw, Popeye Jones, Christian Laettner, Tyronn Lue, Wes Unseld Jr., and more. 

Whether a reader is drawn to a specific voice or a theme (leadership, legacy, work ethic, media pressure, etc.), they will find a great deal to hold on to. This is a book you keep close, not just read once and shelve; it is designed so readers can pick it up, drop into any section, and walk away with something powerful.

Lessons from Michael Jordan reads like a locker room conversation turned life lesson. The tone stays raw but reflective. Each contributor brings their truth, and Etan Thomas steps in as a guide. It’s for the student who needs a shot of belief, the athlete grinding in silence, the young person wondering if they’re seen or understood―or anyone interested in learning life and basketball lessons from the greatest player to ever grace the hardwood.

From the final decades of US slavery to the present, a powerful and illuminating history of a profound inequity: the special burden of infant care and loss experienced by Black women.

In the United States, Black infants are far less likely than white infants to survive their first year of life. Underlying this predicament is a history of profound loss and persistent striving, which has durably shaped Black life in America. Following generations of mothers, caregivers, laborers, and activists from the final decades of slavery to the present, Perilous Passages chronicles the intimate practices and collective strategies Black communities created and relied upon to sustain early life threatened by disease, inadequate medical care, and racialized harm.

Perilous Passages examines nineteenth-century domestic care practices that carried families through the violence of slavery and war, and traces Black eugenic ideas, the efforts of various grassroots movements, and myths and realities surrounding the 1980s panic over “crack babies.” Health professionals, legal officials, and scientific experts exerted pressure, sometimes directly―as in antimidwifery campaigns―and sometimes more subtly, through life insurance practices that devalued Black life. Wangui Muigai shows that at every turn, authorities recast infant deaths as the fault of Black women, with ongoing impact on birthing experiences and outcomes. Still, Black women and their communities have always done more than bear loss. They have produced vital knowledge about its causes, trained in specialized care, developed networks of cradle-to-grave support, and organized to reform society in ways that safeguard children.

Centering Black women’s experiences, Perilous Passages insists on visceral confrontation with the deadliness of American racism while also offering a powerful account of what makes life possible.

For the first time ever, one of the world’s most iconic business leaders shares the story of his remarkable life and career.

Ken Chenault has lived his life at the confluence of the historical forces that have shaped modern America, keenly aware of both the burdens of its past and the dynamic potential of its future. Born in 1951, when segregation was still inscribed in the laws of the land, he ascended to the peak of corporate America over the course of the next fifty years. In his thoughtful and wide-ranging memoir, Chenault reflects on his personal journey, the mentors who shaped him, and his lifelong quest to realize his own potential and make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. Equal to the Task is a classic American story for our times.

After joining American Express, Chenault steadily worked his way up to the very top. He led the company for almost two decades, driving market-leading innovations, before stepping down and making another surprising life choice. Eschewing the more traditional roles for former CEOs, he joined a dynamic venture capital firm, seeking to help build enduring companies that leverage technology for both profit and purpose. Over the past years, he has continued to be a steady voice of moral clarity in the public and private sectors.

“In these pages, I share how I managed the opportunities and challenges encountered over the course of my life and career. In doing so, I hope to convey the values I hold most dear. Values passed down to me by my ancestors, my parents, my teachers, my heroes, and my mentors. These values have guided me throughout my journey, and I consider them pivotal to meeting these extraordinary times as my country wrestles with its own identity, its future, and its role in the 21st century.”

A New York Times Notable Book

A landmark reinterpretation of the civil rights movement that challenges reductive heroic narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and invigorates new debates and possibilities for the future of the struggle for liberation.

We are all familiar with the romantic vision of the civil rights movement: Heroic African Americans and their allies courageously triumphed over racial oppression, forging a new consensus in American life and law. What are the effects of this celebratory storytelling? What happens when a living revolt against injustice becomes an embalmed museum piece?

In this innovative work, Brandon Terry rejects the authority of the romantic narrative―the “arc of justice” story found in popular histories, the speeches of Barack Obama, and the writings of John Rawls―while also pushing back against the rival ironic mode of Afropessimism. Though sympathetic to the critiques of Afropessimists, Terry ultimately finds their thought self-undermining.

Instead of romance or irony, he argues, the civil rights movement is best understood through the lens of tragedy. By challenging the attachment to triumphant pasts, Terry demonstrates that tragedy exemplifies what the civil rights movement has been and can still be. Provocative and original, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers optimism without naïveté, to train our judgment and resilience in the face of reasonable despair.

“Engrossing and informative.” ―Zaakir Tameez, New York Times Book Review

From one of the most acclaimed and influential historians of the United States, an insightful guide to our history and why it matters.

Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner’s keynote has been American freedom and the recurring battles over its meanings and boundaries. His award-winning works show that freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, and that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance. The present political moment makes the importance of these themes abundantly clear.

This collection of Foner’s recent reviews and commentaries demonstrates the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery, through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our current politics. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with crystalline prose. Foner takes up towering figures from Washington to Lincoln, Douglass, and Rosa Parks, pivotal events such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the fragility of constitutional guarantees to civil liberties, due process, and birthright citizenship, whether in times of war or peace. He also explores recent controversies over how to commemorate, and how to teach, our history.

From the Washington Post’s first race and ethnicity reporter, a poignant investigation into the aftermath of the Great Migration, the promise of a Second Great Migration, and what future Black communities could look like across America in this eye-opening and thoughtful study, a mix of The Warmth of Other Suns and How the Word Is Passed.

Since the 1990s, demographers have been documenting a new Great Migration: millions of Black Americans leaving Northern and Western cities for the South their parents and grandparents fled during Jim Crow. Huge numbers of Black people have been moving to Memphis, Houston, Charlotte, and other booming metropolises in the hopes of recreating the vibrant communities their grandparents once left. Have they found what they were looking for? Is it possible for Black Americans to have community, economic prosperity, and safety all in one place? And if so, where?

In the Search for Black Mecca, Emmanuel Felton examines how these questions are playing out in real lives today, going into the homes of Black Americans who are weighing what they want and where they hope to find it. He identifies three archetypes—“Those Who Stay,” “Those Who Leave,” and “Those Who Build Something New”—and reveals the costs and benefits of each decision, while seeking answers to deeper questions regarding communal responsibility, what’s needed to make Black neighborhoods thrive, and how to manage the fact that white people are often threatened by Black success. He also unravels his own family’s migration story through the lives of his two grandfathers—a prominent New Orleans dentist and a troubled musician who migrated to Oakland, California.

Through these stories, Felton crystalizes our understanding of what it means to find—or to create —our own meccas: radical spaces for Black joy, freedom, and imagination, even when the external world tries to take those places away.

A hidden history of twentieth-century American modernity that re-examines a mere twelve-block area on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with Thelonious Monk as its guiding star. 

The Jungles reclaims the largely forgotten world of San Juan Hill, a predominantly Black neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side, was one of the most fertile centers of American cultural life in the twentieth century.

At once a biography, an urban history, and a cultural reckoning, Howard W. French’s The Jungles reveals how the neighborhood that would encompass Lincoln Center, previously known as the Jungles, fostered numerous pathbreaking Black artists, among them a young Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917–1982).

The story opens in Cuba in 1898, where we watch as Teddy Roosevelt’s forces triumph on San Juan Hill, with close to one-fifth of the overall invading force consisting of Black soldiers whose valor went largely unrecognized. After returning to the US, these veterans joined a broader wave of Black migrants moving northward, eventually settling in a Manhattan -neighborhood that would take the battle’s name. San Juan Hill became a lively, artistic Black community that preceded the Harlem Renaissance and inspired some of the highest twentieth- century creative triumphs―giving rise to the stride piano style and nurturing the genius of Monk, whose mold-breaking artistry struggled to gain traction in an industry then dominated by white producers.

As Robert Moses began tearing down the neighborhood under the guise of “urban renewal,” Monk became its most famous holdout, staying put in his cramped apartment in the Phipps Houses at 243 West 63rd Street, his upright piano protruding from his bedroom into the kitchen as he continued to make his iconic music.

By the late 1950s, Monk’s genius had finally been recognized, but the erasure already felt irreversible, extending even to the musical West Side Story, which reimagined the neighborhood’s streets as Latino gang territory, whitewashing the predominantly Black and Caribbean community that had actually lived there.

A compelling history from one of our finest American historians, The Jungles ultimately emerges as a new way of telling the history of music, of New York, and of America. The cradle of jazz was not only in New Orleans but also in San Juan Hill, and French’s magnificent recreation of that vanished world, and of the miraculous life of Thelonious Monk, restores to American cultural memory what erasure nearly stole for good.

12 illustrations

An eloquent and original exploration of the Atlantic slave trade―now featuring the essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand.

A monumental work of first-person history, Lose Your Mother traces the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey Saidiya Hartman took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and the rippling effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African-American history.

The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger―torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to be uprooted from your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. Instead, she is a stranger in search of strangers, forging connections with others living in the wake of atrocity.

A rigorous and intimate reflection on the afterlife of slavery, Lose Your Mother is both a book of history and a book of grief. This 20th anniversary edition now includes Hartman’s landmark essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand―perfect for introducing new readers to Hartman’s lived-in way of contending with the past.

Together for the first time in this beautiful boxed set, the landmark Love Song to the Nation trilogy by the feminist icon bell hooks, includes the New York Times bestsellers All About Love, Communion, and Salvation.

All About Love: New Visions reveals how lovelessness results in a polarized society, and how we can do the work to heal these divisions. This book is a roadmap to understanding how we can build caring, compassionate, and loving spaces into our homes, schools, and workplaces.

Communion: The Female Search for Lovechallenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as a heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. It reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives.

Salvation: Black People and Love Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans.

A wild, rollicking, firsthand account of the good ole days of funk from Bootsy Collins, the legendary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame bass guitarist for James Brown, George Clinton, and Parliament-Funkadelic. Funky foreword courtesy of Snoop Dogg.

He’s a bona fide funk legend, a rhinestone-clad style icon, and arguably one of the best bassists to ever live. (At least, according to Rolling Stone.) His career has spanned five decades: from rising to stardom playing alongside James Brown; to setting the bar, the groove, and the look of Parliament-Funkadelic; to collaborating with today’s most innovative and beloved musicians, like Anderson .Paak, Snoop Dogg, and Bruno Mars. Bootsy Collins has more than a few stories to tell.

He is no stranger to the spotlight, and tales of his escapades are whispered among music nerds and the general public. Yet Bootsy’s story has never been put on the page.

Now, in his own words — “the straight up, real deal, if I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’, and I ain’t ready to go yet”— Bootsy is ready to share with fans legendary stories about:

* the ins and outs of his three-decade relationship with mentor and sometimes tormentor James Brown—including dropping acid with the Godfather of Soul himself
* how a one-night stand almost resulted in him being killed by a member of Florida’s Black Mafia
* when he and the Parliament-Funkadelic crew were mistaken for a group of escaped convicts, and during a detailed cavity search, the LAPD found George Clinton’s a**-stash
* his collaborative and tumultuous relationship with funk legend George Clinton
* eventually getting clean and becoming the favorite OG for a new crop of musicians and artists

Bootsy’s story is full of heart, humor, joy, sorrow, and a whooooole lot of funk. True to its iconic creator, Funked Around, Found Out includes psychedelic photos, costumes, guitars, and other surprises that are as closely associated with Bootsy as his thumping grooves. Music fans, pop culture aficionados, and other acolytes will rejoice.

DELUXE LIMITED EDITION first printing featuring stenciled edges

The LONG AWAITED adult debut novel by beloved NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING Dhonielle Clayton: a romantic contemporary fantasy novel set in New Orleans, about a woman pulled back into a forbidden love, kicking off a brand new series

Collette Marchand never wanted to return home to the immortal wards of New Orleans, let alone inherit her mother’s blood-soaked business. Collette left magic and a great love behind a decade ago, tucking herself away in Boston. But now, her mother, Lady Red, the living Conjure Saint and matriarch of the most notorious Conjure House, has died for the final time.

Back in New Orleans, Téo Baptiste is stuck. He’s working at the same hospital where, ten years ago, he lost everything – his sobriety and the love of his life, Collette. Nights at the busiest ER in the city help him bury his feelings and ignore his magical destiny to take over the undead immortal ward. But Lady Red’s death might be his chance to make things right with Collette again, and build a new future for himself.

When Collette is summoned back home to bury her mother, she uncovers Lady Red’s greatest secret: the true source of her power is a stolen card from the Deck of Life. A card that, along with the family business, passes to Collette. Determined to rewrite the past, Collette needs help from the last person she wants to see ever again: her former flame and the man who shattered her heart, Téo. Now, Collette must confront whether she’s destined to become the next Lady Red and rule over the immortal wards of New Orleans and beyond … or take a second chance at love.