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.

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.

Four-time Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox shares her journey as a transgender woman in Hollywood, confronting childhood trauma, shame, gender identity, her transition, body image issues, her search for romantic love, deep-seated feelings of unworthiness, and ultimately, healing.

Laverne Cox is a powerhouse in the fight for transgender rights and representation—but her path from a struggling trans actress to a cultural movement was anything but easy.

Surviving a childhood full of trauma, dealing with depression, and working at a drag restaurant in New York City for seven years, Laverne was turning forty and felt it was time to throw in the towel when it came to being a Hollywood star—then she booked the character of Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black. Her world changed overnight.

She made history as the first openly transgender person nominated for a Primetime Emmy, starred in a range of high-profile shows, and became the first transgender person to win a Daytime Emmy as executive producer on Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word. A red-carpet fashion icon, podcast host, and fearless advocate, she uses her stardom to champion LGBTQ+ rights, whether on Hollywood’s biggest stages, her personal channels, or at Supreme Court hearings. And she’s only getting started.

In Transcendent, you will experience life in Laverne’s shoes, from her childhood abuse to making her big break, dealing with Hollywood bureaucracy, feeling lonely in a world that is unaccepting, and finding her voice through the chaos of it all. With behind-the-scenes stories and personal reflection, we can heal and fight for equality, right alongside Laverne.

A revelatory look at the life, work, and legacy of the legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey
 
Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance.
 
Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.
 
Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art  
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025)

With biblical wisdom and restorative insights, discover what truly matters in this bold, action-oriented devotional to move toward a life fueled by purpose, faith, and action.

What if the reason you feel stuck isn’t because you’re not trying hard enough?

So many of us spend our lives chasing status and success—anything that will make us feel valuable—only to face utter exhaustion when we realize that these things are not enough. We push harder. Work longer. Give more. And still, feel like we’re falling short.

But what if the problem isn’t your effort. What if it’s your focus?

Through one hundred simple yet profound devotions, mental health professional and inspirational speaker Albaner C. Eugene, Jr. turns your attention to the three things that truly matter: God, self, and others. When you understand the depth of God’s love for you, the importance of your unique life, and the value of relationships with others, the way you move in the world changes. You break free from burnout. Your shoulders relax. Motivation and clarity return. You reclaim your energy, renew your mind, and revive your faith.

Featuring biblical references, actionable steps, reflective moments, and prayers, Momentum equips you to make real progress toward that intentional, joyful, and abundant life.

A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers.

Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life.

Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students.

Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America."

Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

Founded in 1876, Prairie View A&M University is the second-oldest public institution of higher learning in Texas, one of two Texas land-grant universities, and an “institution of the first class” within the Texas A&M University System. It is also the first public historically Black college or university (HBCU) in Texas. Prairie View A&M has played a pivotal role in the educational and economic experiences of African American Texans. As the university celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2026, editors Will Guzmán and William T. Hoston document and interpret the actions of important individuals, campus institutions, and cultural traditions that made Prairie View A&M what it is today.

The Hill We Climbed: Prairie View A&M University complements former Prairie View professor George R. Woolfolk’s classic 1962 work Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience, 1878–1946 and Michael Nojeim’s 2011 Down that Road: A Pictorial History of Prairie View A&M University to further contextualize Prairie View A&M’s place among HBCUs, higher education in general, and Texas Black life in particular. Prairie View A&M University has a long and rich history, of which past literature provides only a small sampling. In celebrating the 150–year anniversary of the founding of this historically Black institution, The Hill We Climbed documents how the university continues to fulfill its historic mission, encapsulating PVAMU’s motto: “Prairie View produces productive people.”

“This singular memoir stunned me. With a poet’s precision, Rachel Eliza Griffiths renders two interwoven tragedies few others could have lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor.”—Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars’ Club

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary people can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and assume responsibility for what it takes to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.

“Like attending a jazz concert with all of one’s favorite musicians…James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and more…Glaude brilliantly takes us on an epic tour through their lives and work.”
―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude’s unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency constrained our politics as we turned to yet another prophet-like figure. He examines his personal history and the traditions that both shape and overwhelm his own voice.

Glaude weaves anecdotes about his evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, encouraging us to reflect on the lessons of these great thinkers and address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own.

Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must step out from under the shadows of past giants to build a better society―one that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit.

Residual textures, patterns and structures of the abandoned Ebony and Jet offices represent both the spirit of a Black publishing empire and the sense of its loss

This book by photographer Barbara Karant commemorates the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of the iconic Ebony and Jet magazines and the most influential Black-owned media corporation of its day. Karant spent more than three years documenting the company’s historic building at 820 S. Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, capturing the last vestiges of the original workspace after the company sold the building in 2010 and relocated in 2012. These vibrant interiors, which remained largely unchanged from 1972 to 2012, fostered the creativity of a staff working in a variety of media. Each floor of the 11-story building flaunted distinct color and pattern combinations, and its bold, contemporary design telegraphed JPC’s position at the forefront of Black American business and culture. Stripped of its furnishings, the interiors of the former JPC headquarters simultaneously represent the spirit of this landmark company and the sense of its loss, of a seminal moment in Black American history and the history of this nation.
Accompanying the approximately 125 color photographs by Karant are documentary images of the original interiors, along with other archival material.  A foreword by Deborah Willis and essays by Aaron Bryant, Cheryl Finley, Carla Williams, Jon Ott, Brenna Wynn Greer, and E. James West address JPC’s dominance as an image and tastemaker in mid- to late-20th century America, the landscape of American Black media, the Ebony in-house photo studio, and the site-specific lobby sculpture by Richard Hunt. Short texts by former employees who worked in the building contribute important documentation to JPC’s history. 820 Ebony/Jet is a tribute to the achievements of this remarkable American company.

Unfolding as both an archive and an origin story, this publication marks the first institutional monograph dedicated to Detroit-born artist LaKela Brown, whose sculptural reliefs translate the language of adornment into an aesthetic of memory, intimacy, and cultural lineage. Brown's plaster casts and gilded surfaces echo the textures of jewelry, bamboo earrings, rope chains, hair braids, and domestic patterns―motifs drawn from Black aesthetics and everyday life. Through composition, touch, and repetition, she transforms these symbols of identity and style into a visual vocabulary that honors embodied experience and cultural inheritance. Essays by Rhea L. Combs, Jessica Kenyatta Walker, and Jova Lynne bring together perspectives from Black feminist theory, curatorial practice, and contemporary art to frame Brown's work within longer genealogies of Black material culture and expressive labor, tracing the ways Brown's sculptural gestures mirror the intricate processes through which stories and aesthetics are passed across generations.

The big-hearted, bestselling South Korean memoir co-written by two best friends flouting gender norms and societal expectations with their decision to grow old together under one roof.

When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence—savoring solitude, quiet mornings, and the unmitigated freedom of living alone. But in their forties, something shifted, and they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Refusing to settle for the outdated choice between marriage or isolation, Hana and Sunwoo made a radical decision: to buy a home and live together—not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family.

Now a bustling household of two women and four cats, Hana and Sunwoo still value solitude, but can do so while sharing a life and its meaning with someone else. Together they navigate the challenges and comforts of cohabiting in midlife, the growing pains of interdependence and the unexpected rewards of compromise when you’ve grown set in your ways. From sick days to career wins to aging parents and beach-side retirement plans, they are redefining domestic bliss on their own terms, where love, partnership, and home are defined not by tradition, but by choice.

With warmth, wit, and sharp social insight, Hana and Sunwoo share their blueprint for building a life outside the scripts of marriage and society’s expectations for women. Two Women Living Together is a quiet revolution—a celebration of female friendship, community, and the many forms that love and family can take.