The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination. The popular movement they created was marked by a vigorous artistic renaissance, militant political action, and fierce ideological debate.

Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement’s most radical aims—the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution—were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics.

Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself.

Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics.

Cedric Johnson is assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Celebrate the release of The Unhaunting with Micaiah Johnson!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, October 1 @ 7 PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to grab your copy of the book, support the author and our store programming.

Please note outside copies of the book will not be allowed in the bookstore and you will not be eligible for the signing/photo line. You must buy a book from Kindred Stories.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A house, itself, is nothing. It’s not a shelter until it is sheltering someone. A house is a housefire, waiting for its match. A house is a ghost story, waiting for its death.

At the end of the Civil War, a daughter of the Confederacy made what she thought was an innocent wish: to build a house where nothing bad could happen. But peace came at a price, and one hundred and seventy years later Shantell and her friends are about to discover where all that darkness ended up.

When Shantell’s best friend, Avery, tells her he has inherited a house big enough to make their dreams of a sanctuary come true, she’s too cautious to be optimistic. A lifetime of loss — her father to the Iraq war, her brother to police violence, and her mother to suicide — has taught her cynicism, and even though Avery swears the house has never experienced a tragedy, she goes along expecting everything from black mold to evil spirits.

But not only is the house in better shape than they’d expected, it makes them better too: Shantell’s anxiety stops flaring up; terminally shallow Avery is suddenly capable of deeper emotions; and Tobias, Avery’s older brother and the contractor for the job, even quits chain smoking.

There’s an eeriness to the calm, and it’s almost a relief when they realize they do not walk alone in Abernathy House. If nothing bad has ever happened here, where are all these ghosts coming from? As they dig into the house’s history, Shantell, Avery, and Tobias discover that there’s only one thing worse than a house that’s haunted: a house that desperately wants to be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Micaiah Johnson is a Carl Brandon and Compton Crook Award-winning author. Her debut novel, The Space Between Worlds, was a Sunday Times Bestseller, a Locus Award finalist, an Editors’ Choice at The New York Times and was named one of best books of 2020 and one of the best science fiction books of the last decade by NPR. Her follow-up novel, Those Beyond the Wall, a timely look at violence during apartheid, was released in March 2024 and has been named as a Best Books of 2024 by NPR, Reactor, Esquire and Lithub. She received her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Camden, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

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Years before he wrote his National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson created these sidesplitting and subversive gag comics about Black life in America, now collected for the first time in nearly half a century.

Before Charles Johnson found fame as a novelist and won the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1991, he was a cartoonist, and a very good one.

Taught via mail correspondence course by the comics editor Lawrence Lariar, mentored by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and inspired by the call of poet Amiri Baraka to celebrate and depict Black life in America, Johnson crafted some of the fiercest and funniest cartoons of the twentieth century. 

Reimagining the gag comic as a powerful and incendiary tool, Johnson tackled America’s mid-century afflictions—segregation, inner-city poverty, police brutality, and white supremacy—by craftily subverting stale gag tropes. He populated them with bullet-dodging Black Panthers, doubt-filled Klansmen, militant babies, self-serving politicians, and complacent suburban liberals.

This collection, Johnson’s first in nearly fifty years, brings together work from across his career: college newspaper gags, selections from his books Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time, his unpublished manuscript Lumps in the Melting Pot, and uncollected pieces. Taken together, this volume reveals Johnson as long overdue for appreciation as a cartoonist of the first order. 

Anthony Anderson and Cedric The Entertainer, comedic royalty and hosts of A&E’s Kings of BBQ, gather their favorite recipes into an accessible and entertaining cookbook like no other.

For both Anthony Anderson and Cedric The Entertainer, two of the biggest names in comedy of all time, barbeque is more than just food—it’s a way of life. Recipes are passed down through generations at backyard cookouts, and pitmasters around the country carry on those traditions at their restaurants. That’s what the television show Kings of BBQ on A&E (and now streaming on Hulu) captured as Anthony and Cedric traveled the country with the goal of launching their own spice and BBQ sauce product lines. Their AC Barbeque product line is now carried thousands of stores nationwide, and fans are clamoring for this cookbook to go with them.

Organized by regions of the country to best capture the soul of the food including St. Louis, Memphis, and the Carolinas, AC Barbecue showcases the charm of these brilliant actors and comics both in the writing and bold photography. Recipes range from pork belly burnt ends to dry rub beef brisket to jerk ribs, and other favorites like macaroni salad, baked beans, fried catfish, and hush puppies are included as well. There are even snacks and desserts like fried pickles and peach cobbler, and maybe best of all, a whole chapter of sauces and rubs.

Whether you’re a seasoned pitmaster or just firing up your backyard grill, this book is a celebration of the rich traditions, bold flavors, and undeniable joy of barbequing. Packed with mouthwatering recipes, stunning photography, and Anthony and Cendric’s infectious personalities, this cookbook is a must-have for anyone looking to bring soul and flavor to their own backyard gatherings.

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With racial justice struggles on the rise, a probing collection considers the past and future of Black radicalism

Black rebellion has returned. Dramatic protests have risen up in scores of cities and campuses; there is renewed engagement with the history of Black radical movements and thought. Here, key intellectuals—inspired by the new movements and by the seminal work of the scholar Cedric J. Robinson—recall the powerful tradition of Black radicalism while defining new directions for the activists and thinkers it inspires.

In a time when activists in Ferguson, Palestine, Baltimore, and Hong Kong immediately connect across vast distances, this book makes clear that new Black radical politics is thoroughly internationalist and redraws the links between Black resistance and anti-capitalism. Featuring the key voices in this new intellectual wave, this collection outlines one of the most vibrant areas of thought today.

With contributions from Greg Burris, Jordan T. Camp, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon, Stefano Harney, Christina Heatherton, Robin D.G. Kelley, George Lipsitz, Fred Moten, Paul Ortiz, Steven Osuna, Kwame M. Phillips, Shana L. Redmond, Cedric J. Robinson, Elizabeth P. Robinson, Nikhil Pal Singh, Damien M. Sojoyner, Darryl C. Thomas, and Françoise Vergès.

A nuanced profile, in image and text, of the great Black Power leader at the exhilarating moment of the movement’s ascendancy

Gordon Parks’ 1967 Life magazine essay “Whip of Black Power” is a nuanced profile of the young, controversial civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael gained national attention and inspired media backlash when he issued the call for Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966. Parks shadowed him from the fall of 1966 to the spring of 1967, as Carmichael gave speeches, headed meetings and promoted the growing Black Power movement. Parks’ photos and writing addressed Carmichael’s intelligence and humor, presenting the whole man behind the headline-making speeches and revealing his own advocacy of Black Power and its message of self-determination and love.
Stokely Carmichael and Black Power delves into Parks’ groundbreaking presentation of Carmichael, with analysis of his images and accompanying text about the charismatic leader. Lisa Volpe explores Parks’ complex understanding of the movement and its leader, and Cedric Johnson frames Black Power within the heightened political moment of the late 1960s. Carmichael’s own voice is represented through a reprint of his important 1966 essay “What We Want.”
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a photographer, filmmaker, musician and author whose 50-year career focused on American culture, social justice, the civil rights movement and the Black American experience. Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, which led to a position with the Farm Security Administration. In 1969 he became the first Black American to write and direct a major feature film, The Learning Tree, and his next directorial endeavor, Shaft (1971), helped define a film genre.

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.

To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

Les chants francophones et créoles de Louisiane résonnent à travers les bayous depuis des siècles, façonnés par leurs influences africaines, amérindiennes, françaises et caribéennes. Pasé Bél Tan : Francophonies et Créolités en Louisiane rend hommage à cet héritage culturel à travers une compilation sonore sur disque vinyle et un livre bilingue (disponibles dans le cadre d'une offre groupée), conjuguant enregistrements d'archives et regards contemporains, invitant artistes et chercheurs à s'aventurer par-delà les paysages sonores de la région. Naviguant entre un présent vibrant et un passé douloureux, ce projet s'attache à ouvrir un espace de dialogue autour de l'identité, de la mémoire et de la transformation continue des traditions musicales louisianaises.
Contributions de Warren Kimball, Cedric Watson, Sid Williams, Sara Le Menestrel, Lee Russell, Barry Jean Ancelet, Zachary Richard, Jonathan Myers, Drake LeBlanc & Gwendolen von Einsiedel.

The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

‘Johnson is a leading voice of his generation.’ – New York Times

The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

Working with a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Rashid Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art. Personal references and pervasive cultural narratives are interweaved with the legacy of modernist abstraction, producing what critics have labelled ‘conceptual post-black art’. A precocious talent (his work was included in the seminal ‘Freestyle’ exhibition in New York in 2001), Johnson received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honours contributions in the field of African-American art.