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.

Tiffany Aliche was a successful pre-school teacher with a healthy nest egg when a recession and advice from a shady advisor put her out of a job and into a huge financial hole. As she began to chart the path to her own financial rescue, the outline of her ten-step formula for attaining both financial security and peace of mind began to take shape. These principles have now helped more than one million women worldwide save and pay off millions in debt, and begin planning for a richer life. Revealing this practical ten-step process for the first time in its entirety, Get Good with Money introduces the powerful concept of building wealth through financial wholeness: a realistic, achievable, and energizing alternative to get-rich-quick and over-complicated money management systems. With helpful checklists, worksheets, a tool kit of resources, and advanced advice from experts who Tiffany herself relies on (her “Budgetnista Boosters”), Get Good with Money gets crystal clear on the short-term actions that lead to long-term goals, including:

A simple technique to determine your baseline or “noodle budget,” examine and systemize your expenses, and lay out a plan that allows you to say yes to your dreams.

An assessment tool that helps you understand whether you have a “don’t make enough” problem or a “spend too much” issue—as well as ways to fix both.

Best practices for saving for a rainy day (aka job loss), a big-ticket item (a house, a trip, a car), and money that can be invested for your future.

Detailed advice and action steps for taking charge of your credit score, maximizing bill-paying automation, savings and investing, and calculating your life, disability, and property insurance needs.

Ways to protect your beneficiaries’ future, and ensure that your financial wishes will stand the test of time.

An invaluable guide to cultivating good financial habits and making your money work for you, Get Good with Money will help you build a solid foundation for your life (and legacy) that’s rich in every way.

A founding document of African American Studies, reissued for today’s students and scholars
 
In a landmark 1968 conference at Yale University, students, faculty, and community activists helped establish “Afro‑American Studies” as a major, and then a thriving department, at Yale. In these conference proceedings, participants argue for the necessity of Black Studies as a field, start to delineate its central debates, discuss its relationship to the broader community, and plot a course of study. Bristling with implied action and the power of an idea whose time has come, this classic reissue will serve as a resource for new generations of scholars and activists.
  
Contributors to the proceedings include McGeorge Bundy, Lawrence W. Chisolm, Harold Cruse, David Brion Davis, Nathan Hare, Maulana Ron Karenga, Martin Kilson, Jr., Gerald A. McWorter, Sidney W. Mintz, Boniface Obichere, Alvin Poussaint, Edwin S. Redkey, Charles H. Taylor, Jr., and Robert Farris Thompson.
 
In a new introduction, Farah Jasmine Griffin reflects on the legacy of this book and the trajectory of the field over the decades; forewords by Ralph C. Dawson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recall the pioneering moment at Yale and all that it made possible.

A kaleidoscopic history of the Studio Museum in Harlem told through oral histories, essays, and a trove of archival imagery

Founded in 1968 by a diverse group of artists, community activists, and philanthropists, the Studio Museum in Harlem is internationally known for its catalytic role in promoting the work of artists of African descent. The Museum has a unique history but until now, there has not been a publication that positions its founding and tells its story.

Bringing together oral histories from the Museum’s founding figures; essays by leading scholars, curators, and artists; and a trove of archival material, this dynamic volume offers the first comprehensive history of the Studio Museum. In-depth essays anchor thematic sections examining the Museum’s founding, its collecting practices and exhibitions, and community engagement. Shorter texts and monologues drawn from interviews with foundational figures immerse the reader in specific events, exhibitions, and moments in the landmark institution’s history. At the book’s center is an expansive visual archive offering a timeline in ephemera and photographs, many of them published here for the first time. This richly illustrated volume will serve as the definitive resource on the history and legacy of the place “Where Black Art Lives.”

Distributed for the Studio Museum in Harlem

Over the last decade, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has had a tremendous influence on scholars and activists alike, deeply shaping debates on the place of race within capitalist societies. Is race subsumed by class, with the latter the sine qua non of capitalism? Do race and class act independently within modern societies? Or does capitalism inevitably express a deeper racial impetus in the West? In this, the first book-length discussion of Black Marxism, Nimtz lays out the limits of Robinson’s much-celebrated text, showing it represents a sophisticated, but ultimately flawed, version of Black nationalism. Nimtz defends Marxism from Robinson’s accusations of myopia on matters of race, suggesting that, in charging Marx and Engels with Eurocentrism, he either failed to understand, or misrepresented, their work―and that, in effect, many thinkers inspired by Black Marxism blatantly misrepresented Marxist texts. Especially in his writings about the U.S. Civil War, Marx had far more to say about race than is commonly understood, Nimtz shows.

An authentic Marxism, argues Nimtz, remains the most reliable real-world method for human liberation, not least among peoples of African descent. Speaking for himself as a contemporary of Robinson’s, Nimtz grounds Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique in an account of his own upbringing in New Orleans, and his development throughout the struggles of the 1960s, explaining how and why he came to radically different conclusions. Accessible and engaging,

Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique will be a significant intervention in the race-versus-class debate on the U.S. Left. No doubt, Nimtz’s trenchant critique will generate controversy, highlighting how more possibilities for transracial class alliances exist than ever before―and misguided theories like Robinson’s prevent us from seeing that potential. His detailed rejoinder to Black Marxism is much needed.

From the author of the National Book Award finalist Ghostroots, a debut novel that thrills with its eerie mix of folklore and history.

The lonely daughter of a distant mother, Yosoye arrives in Lagos ready to change her life. Weeks after she begins an internship at a fancy architectural firm, she discovers she is pregnant. Yosoye is joyful―a new life brings the hope of connection and companionship.

But an inexplicable force is haunting the pregnant women of Lagos. As construction speeds ahead on the firm’s glossy new development on land reclaimed from the ocean, stories of the uncanny deaths in the city’s open waters reach a fever pitch. Yosoye finds herself stalked by a presence she can neither ignore nor appease―without risking her unborn baby and her precarious hopes for the future.

In One Leg on Earth, ‘Pemi Aguda turns the question of who belongs in a city into an arresting exploration of what it means to be a mother in an unforgiving world, and a haunting vision of the dark side of progress.

An essential history of modern Black cinema, as led by avant-garde filmmaker, director, novelist, composer, and playwright Melvin Van Peebles.

Beg Borrow Steal, a title inspired by Black artists’ make-a-way-out-of-no-way ethos, is a stirring and remarkable deep dive into Black independent film and culture, as modeled by raconteur and iconoclast Melvin Van Peebles. Award-winning writer Santi Elijah Holley enriches the extraordinary history with interviews from today’s most innovative Black independent filmmakers and actors, such as Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as Van Peebles’s published and unpublished manuscripts, critical reviews, analyses, and reflections.

Independent Black artists across all disciplines—from music and theater to literature and poetry—continue to push boundaries, challenge stereotypes, and pursue their own vision, away from traditional gatekeepers. The success of artists like Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, and Ryan Coogler can be traced directly to the pioneering work of Van Peebles, whose ambitious and innovative multidisciplinary artistry never yielded to anybody else’s vision but his own.

As a Black American who’d overcome poverty, discrimination, and other obstacles, Van Peebles refused to let White America take advantage of him and his talent. It’s made him a beacon for every Black auteur and independent filmmaker of the past 50 years. Sinners, Black Panther, Sorry to Bother You, Get Out, She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, Shaft, Superfly, Daughters of the Dust, Selma, the list goes on. It is impossible to imagine any of these culturally defining films existing, if not for the groundwork laid by Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. It is canon in Black film.

Beg Borrow Steal is the story of the legendary man who provided the blueprint for independent Black cinema, and a tribute to the power of radical Black creativity in American art and culture.

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The familiar story of civil rights goes something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law—and soon, everyday African Americans joined with them to launch the Civil Rights Movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth overturns this story, demonstrating that Black people had long exercised “the rights of everyday use,” and that this lesser-known private-law tradition paved the way for the modern vision of civil rights. Well-versed in the law, Black people had used it to their advantage for nearly a century to shape how they worked, worshiped, learned, and loved. Based on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses, Before the Movement recovers a vision of Black life allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women’s experiences across the African diaspora
 
Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature―bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou―Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked. In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.
 
Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma―Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior―that Washington draws out. Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists

With a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines

Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright.

In Amsterdam, among Harry’s papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining “King Alfred,” a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming “to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society.” Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help.

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider’s view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery.

Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed.

Chairman is the first comprehensive book dedicated to artist and designer Yinka Ilori, tracing his celebrated chairs and the vibrant design language shaped by his British-Nigerian heritage.

Bringing together over a decade of work, the book explores how Ilori transforms discarded and overlooked furniture into powerful vessels of memory, migration and joy. Rooted in the storytelling traditions of his Nigerian upbringing and shaped by the visual landscape of London, Ilori’s chairs operate at the intersection of art, design and social commentary. Each piece carries a narrative, often inspired by parables shared in his childhood, reimagined through bold colour, pattern and craft.

Through newly commissioned photography, archival material and in-depth studio insights, Chairman reveals the processes behind Ilori’s distinctive aesthetic, from material sourcing and restoration to surface intervention and conceptual development. Essays situate his practice within wider conversations on diasporic identity, sustainability, and contemporary design culture, positioning the chair as both a functional object and a cultural archive.

Visually rich and critically engaged, Chairman is both a collector’s object and a significant contribution to twenty-first-century design discourse, offering the first sustained study of an artist whose work reshapes how we understand furniture, authorship and belonging.

GANADOR DEL PREMIO PULITZER

El libro que inspiró la película adaptada nominada al Oscar, ¡ahora en cines!

Después de El ferrocarril subterráneo, Colson Whitehead gana el Pulitzer por segunda vez con esta estremecedora historia sobre dos amigos que luchan por su supervivencia.

Próximamente una película dirigida por el nominado al Premio de la Academia®, RaMell Ross. Llegará a los cines este otoño.

De poco sirve ser un buen estudiante en la Academia Nickel para chicos. Elwood -pobre, huérfano y de raza negra- no tarda en descubrirlo cuando, por un malentendido, le encierran en este reformatorio. Con la ayuda de un buen amigo, este adolescente descubrirá cómo sobrevivir en este lugar que esconde un brutal secreto y una realidad corrupta, respaldada por muchos y obviada por todos.

Basada en el estremecedor caso real de un reformatorio de Florida que estuvo en funcionamiento durante más de un siglo y destrozó la vida de miles de niños, Los chicos de la Nickel es una novela devastadora que, a caballo entre el presente y el final de la segregación racial estadounidense en los años sesenta, muestra la genialidad de un escritor en la cima de su carrera.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The book that inspired the Oscar-nomitaed adapted film—now in theaters!

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Time, Esquire, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vox, Variety, Christian Science Monitor, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Literary Hub, BuzzFeed, The New York Public Library

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020 • SHORLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

The book that inspired the upcoming adapted film, directed by RaMell Ross

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.