African American women have played significant roles in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality, but relatively little is known about many of these leaders and activists.

Most accounts of the civil rights movement focus on male leaders and the organizations they led, leaving a dearth of information about the countless black women who were the backbone of the struggle in local communities across the country. At the local level women helped mold and shape the direction the movement would take. Lulu B. White was one of those women in the civil rights movement in Texas.

Executive secretary of the Houston branch of the NAACP and state director of branches, White was a significant force in the struggle against Jim Crow during the 1940s and 1950s. She was at the helm of the Houston chapter when the Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Smith v. Allbright, and she led the fight to get more blacks elected to public office, to gain economic parity for African Americans, and to integrate the University of Texas.

Author Merline Pitre places White in her proper perspective in Texas, Southern, African American, women's, and general American history; points to White's successes and achievements, as well as the problems and conflicts she faced in efforts to eradicate segregation; and looks at the strategies and techniques White used in her leadership roles.

Pitre effectively places White within the context of twentieth-century Houston and the civil rights movement that was gripping the state. In Struggle Against Jim Crow is pertinent to the understanding of race, gender, interest group politics, and social reform during this turbulent era.

2015 Reprint of 1931 Printing. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This celebrated Picaresque novel is a 1931 Harlem Renaissance era satire on American race relations. Schuyler targets both the KKK and NAACP in condemning the ways in which race functions as both an obsession and a commodity in early twentieth-century America. The central premise of the novel is that an African American scientist invents a process that can transform blacks into whites. Those who have internalized white racism, those who are tired of inferior opportunities socially and economically, and those who simply want to expand their sexual horizons, line up to be transformed. As the country "whitens", the economic importance of racial segregation in the South as a means of maintaining elite white economic and social status becomes increasingly apparent. The novel is known not only for its satiric bite and inventive plot machinations, but also for the caricatures of prominent figures of the American 1920s including W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, James Weldon Johnson, C. J. Walker and others.

This inspirational picture book biography, a collaboration between two Coretta Scott King Honor winners, tells the story of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice on the Supreme Court. Now available in paperback.

Growing up in segregated Baltimore, Thurgood Marshall saw that things weren’t fair. Laws said Black and white people couldn’t attend the same schools, play in the same parks, or even drink from the same water fountains. When he was assigned to read the Constitution as a school punishment, his eyes were opened. Thurgood knew that Jim Crow laws were wrong, and he was willing to do whatever it took to change them.

His determination to fight for equality for all Americans led him to law school and then to the NAACP, where he argued cases like Brown v. Board of Education before being appointed as a Supreme Court justice. But to get to the highest court in the land, Thurgood had to make space for himself every step of the way.

Coretta Scott King Honor winners Kekla Magoon and Laura Freeman unite to tell the incredible story of the first Black Supreme Court justice, who was a remarkable fighter for civil rights and equality throughout his life.

In this haunting historical novel, a light-skinned Black man goes undercover to investigate lynchings in the Jim Crow South, only to be confronted by the very evil that has pursued him since childhood.

Clark Wendell White first encountered the Nightmare as a child during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, when he and his father stood guard over their family home. In the eyes of the mob surging through his neighborhood, Clark sensed this malevolent presence. It was then that the Nightmare took shape, burrowing deep into his mind and feeding on his fear.

Years later, the same evil presence drives Clark to the NAACP's headquarters in New York City, where he answers an ad seeking light-skinned Black men for dangerous undercover work. As a spy for the NAACP, Clark investigates lynchings, impersonating the very Nightmare that once tormented him.

As Clark descends deeper into this double life, another force rises: a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, finding a foothold in the storied streets of New York City. Among its eager recruits is Sam Cahill—the one man who can see past his disguise. Now Clark must outwit both the living and the dead, as he confronts a past that refuses to stay buried and a future where the act of passing exacts a soul-deep price.

Inspired by the life of civil rights activist Walter White, who passed as a white man to expose the brutality of lynchings from the South to the Midwest, American Nightmare is a gripping historical thriller that reveals the most terrifying monsters aren't those that go bump in the night but those that walk among us.

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”

“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

A completely revised and updated handbook of eye-opening—and frequently myth-busting—facts and figures about the real lives of Black Americans today, called “a gift of knowledge” by Susan Taylor, former editor-in-chief of Essence magazine

There’s no defeating white supremacist myths without real data. Hailed as “an important resource for anyone seeking a better understanding of . . . Black America” (Benjamin Todd Jealous, former NAACP president and CEO), this completely revised and updated edition of Black Stats offers new facts, critical analyses, and information on the current state of Black life in the United States, at the quarter-century mark, unhindered by jargon and assumptions.

Monique Couvson, author of the acclaimed Pushout, has compiled statistics from a broad spectrum of telling categories that illustrate the quality of life and the possibility of (and barriers to) advancement for a group at the heart of American society. With fascinating information on a wide range of topics including education, entertainment, sports, and the arts, the environment, health, justice, military service, money and jobs, science and technology, and more, this “invaluable resource” (International Journal of Communications) will enrich and inform many public debates while challenging commonly held yet often misguided perceptions.

Called a “great tool offering descriptive statistics on the condition of our nation’s promise of freedom, justice, equality and economic opportunity for all” by Marc H. Morial, president and CEO, National Urban League, Black Stats simultaneously highlights measures of incredible progress, conveys the disparate impacts of social policies and practices, and surprises with revelations that span many subjects. It is an essential tool for advocates, educators, and anyone seeking racial justice and to understand the complex state of our nation.

*ships in 7 - 10 days*

Now adapted for readers ages 12 and up, the award-winning biography that examines Parks’s life and 60 years of radical activism and brings the civil rights movement in the North and South to life

Rosa Parks is one of the most well-known Americans today, but much of what is known and taught about her is incomplete, distorted, and just plain wrong. Adapted for young people from the NAACP Image Award—winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis and Brandy Colbert shatter the myths that Parks was meek, accidental, tired, or middle class. They reveal a lifelong freedom fighter whose activism began two decades before her historic stand that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and continued for 40 years after. Readers will understand what it was like to be Parks, from standing up to white supremacist bullies as a young person to meeting her husband, Raymond, who showed her the possibility of collective activism, to her years of frustrated struggle before the boycott, to the decade of suffering that followed for her family after her bus arrest. The book follows Parks to Detroit, after her family was forced to leave Montgomery, Alabama, where she spent the second half of her life and reveals her activism alongside a growing Black Power movement and beyond.

Celebrate the release of The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman with Deesha Philyaw!

EVENT DEETS

When: Monday, November 16 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, HTX 77004)

How:

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.
• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy of the book, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup at the event.
• RSVP (I Already Have the Book) to reserve your seat and let us know you plan to bring one you previously purchased from another bookseller.
• Waitlist (

This author talk is officially sold out. Please join the waitlist, and we’ll email you if a ticket becomes available. Please note that joining the waitlist does not guarantee a ticket.

Please note that books purchased from other retailers are not permitted inside the bookstore and will not qualify for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must purchase a copy of the book from Kindred Stories or select the RSVP (But I ALREADY HAVE THE BOOK) ticket option.

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your copy. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The wife of a popular and powerful megachurch pastor upends her charmed “rags-to-Rolex” life when her secret past comes roaring into the spotlight—in this "funny and juicy and sexy and delicious peek behind the pulpit" (Samantha Irby) from the acclaimed and beloved author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

From the moment Scharisse Freeman ditched her humble roots and married a megachurch pastor fifteen years her senior, she’s been labeled too brash and too “of the world” by church folks who grudgingly accepted her into their fold, and too holy by her estranged childhood bestie Petra. Schar doesn’t have many allies, but that hasn’t stopped her from building an enviable business empire spanning books to clothing to branded products, and living the comfortable life her husband's power affords her.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Schar gets the final bit of validation she’s always dreamt of: a coveted invitation to participate in the First Lady USA pageant. This is her chance to be accepted by the other pastors’ wives—First Ladies—who are “like Jesus’ disciples if they had been a group of mean girls.” Finally, blissfully, the ice between Schar and the other First Ladies begins to thaw.

But as the pageant nears, a sensational scandal breaks with Schar at its center, and her carefully curated life implodes. Schar faces down shame and terrible secrets from her childhood and is reminded that in the eyes of the church, optics can matter more than the truth.

Unflinchingly funny, frank, and splendidly unruly, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman exults in the luscious, messy pleasure of finally feeling free.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, the LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard.

Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Event Purchases Are Non-Refundable

*ships in 7-10 business days*

2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist

2020 NAACP Image Award Nominee - Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)

Best-of Lists: Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · 25 Can't-Miss Books of 2019 (The Undefeated)

Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world.

Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love—finding beauty and possibility in life—and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition.

Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools.

With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes, Breathe offers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience.

A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.

Mavis Miller is not a PTA mom. She has enough on her plate with her feisty seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, an exhausting job at a nonprofit, and the complexities of a multigenerational household. So no one is more surprised than Mavis when she caves to Trisha Holbrook, the long-reigning, slightly terrifying PTA president, and finds herself in charge of the school’s brand-new DEI committee.

As one of the few Black parents at this California elementary school, Mavis tries to convince herself this is an opportunity for real change. But things go off the rails at the very first meeting, when the new principal's plans leave Trisha absolutely furious. Later that night, when Mavis spies Trisha in yellow rubber gloves and booties, lugging cleaning supplies and giant black trash bags to her waiting minivan, it’s only natural that her mind jumps to somewhere it surely wouldn’t in the light of day.

Except Principal Smith fails to show up for work the next morning, and has been MIA since the meeting. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mavis, along with the school psychologist with the great forearms (look, it’s worth noting), launches an investigation that will challenge her views on parenting, friendship, and elementary school politics.

Brilliantly written, It's Elementary is a quick-witted, escapist romp that perfectly captures just how far parents will go to give their kids the very best, all wrapped in a mystery that will leave you guessing to the very end.

The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement—a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person’s ability to affect change.
 
“Anne Moody’s autobiography is an eloquent, moving testimonial to her courage.”—Chicago Tribune
 
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till’s lynching. Before then, she had “known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was . . . the fear of being killed just because I was black.” In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.

A straight-A student who realized her dream of going to college when she won a basketball scholarship, she finally dared to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC, she experienced firsthand the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement—and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs, and deadly force that were used to destroy it.

A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation’s destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement.

Praise for Coming of Age in Mississippi
 
“A history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed . . . a timely reminder that we cannot now relax.”—Senator Edward Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review

“Something is new here . . . rural southern black life begins to speak. It hits the page like a natural force, crude and undeniable and, against all principles of beauty, beautiful.”—The Nation

“Engrossing, sensitive, beautiful . . . so candid, so honest, and so touching, as to make it virtually impossible to put down.”—San Francisco Sun-Reporter

A rediscovered classic about how racism and sexism tests the spirit, ambition, and character of three children growing up in Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem, from the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP

With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author Morgan Jerkins

Set in early-twentieth-century New York City, There Is Confusion tells the story of three Black children: Joanna Marshall, a talented dancer willing to sacrifice everything for success; Maggie Ellersley, an extraordinarily beautiful girl determined to leave her working-class background behind; and Peter Bye, a clever would-be surgeon who is driven by his love for Joanna. 

As children, Maggie, Joanna, and Peter support one another’s dreams, but as young adults, romance threatens to upset the balance of their friendship. One afternoon, Joanna makes two irrevocable decisions—and sets off a chain of events that wreaks havoc with all of their lives. 

First published to immense critical acclaim in 1924, written with an Austen-like eye for social dynamics, There Is Confusion is an unjustly forgotten classic that celebrates Black ambition, love, and the struggle for equality. 

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.