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Justyce McAllister is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. Despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can't escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates.

Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out.

Then comes the day Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned up—way up, sparking the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. In the media fallout, it's Justyce who is under attack.

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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.

A celebration of Black History for babies and toddlers!

We Are Black History Board Book from Mudpuppy is a wonderful introduction to the black leaders and trailblazers who have shaped our world! From the inspiring words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the incredible calculations of Katherine Johnson, celebrate the achievements of Black pioneers featuring colorful illustrations by Tequitia Andrews.

* Celebratory Message – This book celebrates prominent Black individuals from the past and the present and includes information about each person featured in the book
* Bright and Bold Artwork – Bright and colorful illustrations on 22 pages will make this a happy and rewarding experience for toddlers to experience and understand inclusion.
* Perfect Size - Small 7” x 7” board book is just the size for little hands.
* Great Gift Idea – This board book makes a wonderful gift for birthdays and special occasions all year through.

Although much Black religious scholarship has engaged with feminist theory and womanist thought, a gap remains where little work has been done in religious studies to investigate the Black male experience. A Misrepresented People explores how African American men grapple with identity and masculinity in relation to Black religious thought. This book counters the dominant portrayal of Black men in American society as suspicious, morally defective, and irredeemable, and showcases the strength and relevance of Black religious thought in developing alternative notions of Black manhood.

Drawing on womanist discourses, African American religious thought, literature, and Black male studies, as well as an examination of the writings and sermons of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr., Darrius D’wayne Hills offers a vision of Black male identity that is grounded in interpersonal relationships and connection. Positioning identity formation as a religious concern, Hills expands the application of religious scholarship toward the complex social and material realities faced by Black men. In doing so, this volume offers a much-needed new model for understanding Black male gender identity, illustrating how religious thought fosters more holistic and livable futures for African American men.

The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.

Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.

America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.

Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.

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The 1967 Arab–Israeli War rocketed the question of Israel and Palestine onto the front pages of American newspapers. Black Power activists saw Palestinians as a kindred people of color, waging the same struggle for freedom and justice as themselves. Soon concerns over the Arab–Israeli conflict spread across mainstream black politics and into the heart of the civil rights movement itself. Black Power and Palestine uncovers why so many African Americans―notably Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, among others―came to support the Palestinians or felt the need to respond to those who did.

Americans first heard pro-Palestinian sentiments in public through the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. Michael R. Fischbach uncovers this hidden history of the Arab–Israeli conflict's role in African American activism and the ways that distant struggle shaped the domestic fight for racial equality. Black Power's transnational connections between African Americans and Palestinians deeply affected U.S. black politics, animating black visions of identity well into the late 1970s. Black Power and Palestine allows those black voices to be heard again today.

In chronicling this story, Fischbach reveals much about how American peoples of color create political strategies, a sense of self, and a place within U.S. and global communities. The shadow cast by events of the 1960s and 1970s continues to affect the United States in deep, structural ways. This is the first book to explore how conflict in the Middle East shaped the American civil rights movement.

The late, legendary performer and activist’s candid reflections on American race relations and social movements, based on previously unpublished conversations with the award-winning historian

Harry Belafonte was more than a bestselling folk singer and Hollywood’s first Black matinée idol; he was also the secret weapon of human rights movements for seventy years—a close confidante of Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt; a trusted whisperer to JFK; and a political advisor to African heads of state.

Belafonte simultaneously advised Robert F. Kennedy on how to win the Black vote, openly supported Communist leaders including Fidel Castro, and skillfully avoided being blacklisted by J. Edgar Hoover. He was also a masterful fundraiser, almost singlehandedly bankrolling the civil rights movement from his own earnings as well as donations solicited from Hollywood friends and Vegas mobsters. It was Belafonte’s idea to organize superstar artists to record the hit song, “We Are the World” in 1984 to benefit famine victims in Africa.

In this candid, revelatory book, drawn from a series of conversations with historian Kevin Baker shortly before Belafonte’s death in 2023, the legendary singer of “Day-O” shares his philosophy on racial politics, African colonialism, the emergence of Israel, the shortcomings of Barack Obama, and the rise of Donald Trump. A Burning House offers a primer on celebrity activism at its best—as well as a cautionary tale about the rise of American authoritarianism.

The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about Black history.

History is at its best when new findings and perspectives challenge old ideas and notions about the past, and even overturn common wisdom.

What if a former enslaved man in Galveston, Texas, witnessed the first Juneteenth and told a completely different story from what most of us know about that day? Why were slave ships most prone to rebellion, including those carrying the most African women? How has Islam found its way into R&B, soul, jazz, and other American popular music? Who was Benjamin Banneker, really?

In A High Price for Freedom, historian Clyde W. Ford addresses these and other questions, amplifying little-known voices from the African American past. In this wide-ranging, impeccably researched book, Ford begins with the 1656 court case of a woman named Elizabeth Key, who won a verdict for her freedom against her would-be enslaver—a victory that would forever change the nature, brutality, and course of American slavery.

Ford examines a range of topics, from the role of women in fomenting slave revolts to an in-depth look at how Selma was not really about voting rights or even Martin Luther King, Jr, but about a twenty-six-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed by an Alabama state trooper. As he laying dying in the only hospital that would treat Black people in February 1965, Jimmie Lee whispered to his nurse, a Catholic nun, “Sister, isn’t this a high price for freedom?”

Eye-opening, enlightening, and often counterintuitive, this fascinating history includes compelling, heartrending, and factual accounts about people and events in the African American past that teach us things we never learned and challenge the stories we thought we knew.

The bestselling, definitive study of African Americans throughout American history, now with a new introduction by noted scholar V. P. Franklin.

In The Negro in the Making of America, eminent historian Benjamin Quarles provides one of the most comprehensive and readable accounts ever gathered in one volume of the role that African Americans have played in shaping the destiny of America. Starting with the arrival of the slave ships in the early 1600s and moving through the Colonial period, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and into the last half of the twentieth century, Quarles chronicles the sweep of events that have brought blacks and their struggle for social and economic equality to the forefront of American life.

Through compelling portraits of central political, historical, and artistic figures such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Quarles illuminates the African American contributions that have enriched the cultural heritage of America. This classic history also covers black participation in politics, the rise of a black business class, and the forms of discrimination experienced by blacks in housing, employment, and the media.

Quarles's groundbreaking work not only surveys the role of black Americans as they engaged in the dual, simultaneous processes of assimilating into and transforming the culture of their country, but also, in a portrait of the white response to blacks, holds a mirror up to the deeper moral complexion of our nation's history. The restoration of this history holds a redemptive quality—one that can be used, in the author's words, as a "vehicle for present enlightenment, guidance, and enrichment."

A Civil Rights Journey presents the astonishing archive of Dr Doris Derby: photographer, activist, and professor of anthropology. Active throughout the Civil Rights Movements of the mid twentieth century in the southern United States, particularly Mississippi, Derby acted as a photographer, organiser and teacher, making photographs of the intimate and human side of the everyday struggle for survival and human rights. She photographed both the organisation of political events, meetings, and funerals, alongside the literacy, co-operative and community theatre programmes, many of which she founded, and encountered much danger and tragedy along the way. Here we see the speeches and protests that gave the movement its defining moments, as well as vital figures including Muhammad Ali, Alice Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson. We also see classrooms and church halls, doctors and secretaries: everyday scenes of joy, frustration, curiosity, and connection, in which the determination and collective actions and resolve and actions of the movement are equally expressed. This extensive volume presents Derby's images in sequences that between them document rural and urban poverty, offer lucid ethnographies of particular streets and families, track the day-to-day lives of African American children growing up in the Mississippi Delta, and bear witness to such pivotal events as the Jackson State University shooting, the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1968 Democratic Convention. Derby's photographs offer us an invaluably rich portrait of a historical moment whose effects have defined today's world and issues a vital reassertion of the work that remains to be done. Artist photographer Hannah Collins has worked with Doris Derby to recount the events photographed in extensive texts which accompany the images.

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African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision explores the rich past and bright future of the nine Black Greek-Letter organizations that make up the National Pan-Hellenic Council. In the long tradition of African American benevolent and secret societies, intercollegiate African American fraternities and sororities have strong traditions of fostering brotherhood and sisterhood among their members, exerting considerable influence in the African American community, and being on the forefront of civic action, community service, and philanthropy. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Arthur Ashe, Carol Moseley Braun, Bill Cosby, Sarah Vaughan, George Washington Carver, Hattie McDaniel , and Bobby Rush are among the many trailblazing members of these organizations. The rolls of African American fraternities and sororities serve as a veritable who's who among African American leadership in the United States and abroad. African American Fraternities and Sororities places the history of these organizations in context, linking them to other movements and organizations that predated them and tying their history to one of the most important eras of United States history―the Civil Rights struggle. African American Fraternities and Sororities explores various cultural aspects of these organizations such as auxilliary groups, branding, calls, stepping, and the unique role of African American sororities. It also explores such contemporary issues as sexual aggression and alcohol use, college adjustment, and pledging, and provides a critique of Spike Lee's film School Daze, the only major motion picture to portray African American fraternities and sororities as a central theme. The year 2006 will mark the centennial anniversary of the intercollegiate African American fraternity and sorority movement. Yet, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to these organizations and the men and women who founded and perpetuated them. African American Fraternities and Sororities reveals the vital social and political functions of these organizations and places them within the history of not only the African American community but the nation as a whole.