This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives.

Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.

Traces the history of the Oakland Community School, the last Community Survival Program of the Black Panther Party

Education for the Revolution offers the first comprehensive historical account of the last standing survival program of the Black Panther Party, the Oakland Community School. First established as the Children’s House in 1970 and operational until 1982, the Oakland Community School provided grade school children with holistic educational and communal practices that oriented them to the Black Panther Party’s political consciousness. Drawing from newspapers, oral histories, and archives, historian Robert P. Robinson links the history of the school to the Black historical tradition of resistance via education, framing the school as a union of Black self-determination and education history.

Robinson situates the Oakland Community School within the Black Panther Party’s longstanding commitment to using education as a tool to achieve liberation. Long before terms like restorative justice, gender inclusion, and culturally relevant pedagogy were popular in classrooms, Robinson explores how students of the Oakland Community School were regarded as co-creators of knowledge alongside their teachers, local activists, and parents. Combining personal reflections from parents, students, and former faculty with an analysis of the school’s concrete teaching practices, the book asserts that their histories are vital to present-day educational efforts.

Whereas popular narratives of the Black Panther Party argue that their political activism ceased by the early 1970s, this history of the Oakland Community School illuminates Black Panther women’s continued efforts to grow power through education. At once compelling and revelatory, Education for the Revolution cements the Oakland Community School’s legacy as one of the most enduring Black independent education projects for social justice, as well as a fascinating precursor to critical forms of education seen today.

Discover the most significant museum collection chronicling African American life, history, and culture, revealing centuries of creativity, resistance, determination, and joy.

At the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s dedication ceremony in 2016, civil rights activist and venerated congressman John Lewis proclaimed, “Oh, say! What a dream can do!” This volume, published to celebrate the Museum’s tenth anniversary, captures that vision through stories told by those collecting and caring for the objects. From the historically profound, such as the miraculous recovery and resurrection of a WWII–era plane used to train Tuskegee Airmen; to the searingly poignant personal keepsakes belonging to the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, whose family carefully preserved them for generations.

The breadth of the collection is extraordinary, spanning visual art, photography, film, and historical artifacts from the seventeenth century to the present. Each object carries its own story and distinctive journey, reflecting the collaboration, care, and commitment required to bring this national museum to life. Other incredible highlights include the Johnson Publishing Company’s famed Ebony Test Kitchen, Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac, and Radio Raheem’s iconic boombox from Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing.

These powerful stories of community, connection, resilience, and remembrance reflect the nation’s story and demonstrate, in enduring and profound ways, what a dream can do.

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

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

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

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White Fear has shaped our democracy and society from the beginning—and today, it’s more intense and visible than ever. To neutralize it, we must first understand it.

For two centuries, the deep-seated fear that many White people feel—of losing power, of losing economic standing, of losing a particular “way of life”—has been the driving force behind American politics and culture. 
White Fear enabled the rise of Donald Trump. It’s behind the recent flood of restrictive voting laws disproportionately impacting people of color. It’s why reactions to movements like Black Lives Matter and football players taking a knee have been so negative and so strong.

As we approach a future where White people will become a racial the minority in the US, something estimated to occur as early as 2043, that fear is only intensifying, festering, and becoming more visible. Are we destined for a violent clash? What can we do to step into our country’s inevitable future, without tearing ourselves apart in the process?

Nationally renowned journalist and award-winning author Roland Martin has been sounding this alarm for more than a decade. In White Fear, he provides a primer on how White Fear has shaped, and continues to shape, our democracy and our culture. He connects the separate puzzle pieces, from the Tea Party Movement to the decline of White American optimism to the diminishing blue-collar workforce, to illuminate the larger picture of what will unfold in America over the next decade-plus, and offers a better way forward.

If we want to create the kind of country that we’re all welcome in and proud to live in, we can no longer ignore White Fear. We must learn to recognize, understand, and dismantle it.

And as the last few years have shown, we don’t have any time to lose.

"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire

In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

"To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is therecord of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.

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.

In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination.

The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.

Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities.

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In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.

Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

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An essential guide for frontline educators to address systemic racial oppression, repair harm, and foster safe, inclusive learning spaces for their students

For educators and readers of Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive, with a foreword by Leigh Patel, author of No Study Without Struggle

Toward Liberation is the timely and practical guide that pioneers new pathways for educators to repair harm and foster transformative learning spaces. This road map for liberatory pedagogy is replete with resources, tools, and strategies drawn from Jamilah Pitts's experiences as a young Black girl, a Black student, a teacher, a former school leader, and a consultant with schools across the country.

Educators will want to mark up and keep their copy of Toward Liberation at their desks for easy reference. In its pages, they will find

• Real-life examples and student writing from Pitts’s classroom
• Explorative questions for teachers to consider in their equity work
• Constructive charts that map out manifestations of harm
• Activities to engage students in liberatory learning
• Healing and self-care strategies for teachers—particularly Black women educators

Pitts infuses her writing with an extensive knowledge base of the education system, honed over years as a teacher, a coach, a dean, an assistant principal, and a national education consultant. The tenets of this book—rooted in truthtelling, activism, healing, wellness, self-care, and, ultimately, love— both inform and are inspired by the healing work Pitts does with educators to this day. In doing this work, she helps to reimagine the role of the critical teacher.

Toward Liberation equips teachers with the tools they need to carve a path toward liberatory educational practices, ensuring that students are afforded the full range of their humanity and their experience, in and out of the classroom.