According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore bell hooks' electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a 'powerful site for intervention, challenge and change'. And intervene, challenge and change is what hooks does best.
Michael Awkward's Philadelphia Freedoms captures the energetic contestations over the meanings of racial politics and black identity during the post-King era in the City of Brotherly Love. Looking closely at four cultural moments, he shows how racial trauma and his native city's history have been entwined. He introduces each of these moments with poignant personal memories of the decade in focus and explores representation of African American freedom and oppression from the 1960s to the 1990s. Philadelphia Freedoms explores NBA players' psychic pain during a playoff game the day after Martin L... View More...
An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race--and promises to change the way we read American literature. Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison reimagines and remaps the possibility of America. Her brilliant discussions of the Africanist presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cat... View More...
A unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays that provides real evidence of the rich cultural history of black women in America. Black women's writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. Here, leading literary critics--both male and female, black and white--look at fiction, nonfiction, poetry, slave narratives, and autobiographies in a totally new way. In essence, they reconstruct a literary history that documents black women as artists, intellectuals, symbol makers, teachers, and survivors. Important writers whose work and lives are ex... View More...
In 1848 William and Ellen Craft made one of the most daring and remarkable escapes in the history of slavery in America. With fair-skinned Ellen in the guise of a white male planter and William posing as her servant, the Crafts traveled by rail and ship--in plain sight and relative luxury--from bondage in Macon, Georgia, to freedom first in Philadelphia, then Boston, and ultimately England. This edition of their thrilling story is newly typeset from the original 1860 text. Eleven annotated supplementary readings, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, help to place the Crafts' story wit... View More...
A bona fide classic, the Sable Arm was the first work to fully chronicle the remarkable story of the nearly 180,000 black troops who served in the Union army. Hailed by such distinguished historians as T. Harry Williams (superbly written) and George B. Tindall (a volume of permanent value), this work paved the way for the exploration of the black military experience in other wars. The present edition, with a new foreword and bibliographical essay, makes available once again a pioneering work that will be especially useful for scholars and students of Civil War, black, and military history. View More...
Congress's first black conservative explains what it's like to be a politically incorrect African American in today's culture. Offering a trenchant analysis of black politics in America today, Franks examines the flaws of the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP, and airs his own informed opinions on such pithy topics as welfare, the American family, and the Supreme Court. View More...
Now in Paper "Seeing Red"Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.A gripping, painstakingly documented account of a neglected chapter in the history of American political intelligence."Kornweibel is an adept storyteller who admits he is drawn to the role of the historian-as-detective....What emerges is a fascinating tale of secret federal agents, many of them blacks, who were willing to take advantage of the color of their skin to spy upon others of their race. And it is a tale of sometimes desperate and frequently angry government officials, including J. Edg... View More...
Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal," created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the nineteenth century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the twenty-first.Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours--race and equality. Wending its way through a half-century of American history, the narrative ... View More...
The first complete and balanced history of the Black Panther Party--powerful and provocativeUntil The Shadow of the Panther there have been no serious book-length attempts to examine the Panthers' history and to evaluate their significance. . . . A Notable Book of the Year.--New York Times Book Review (front page)A keenly observed, often brilliant, Panther-busting book. . . . Pearson nevertheless portrays the Panthers' rise as an understandable reaction against . . . white chauvinism.--Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThis book will awaken profound misgivings--about gun-barrel rhetoric, about arme... View More...
The New York Times bestseller about a young black man's journey from violence and despair to the threshold of stardom: "A beautiful tribute to the power of good teachers" (Terry Gross, Fresh Air). "One of the most inspiring stories I've come across in a long time."-Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review Ryan Speedo Green had a tough upbringing in southeastern Virginia: his family lived in a trailer park and later a bullet-riddled house across the street from drug dealers. His father was absent; his mother was volatile and abusive. At the age of twelve, Ryan was sent to Virginia's juvenile ... View More...
In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ij... View More...
Definitive, scrupulously documented work by a distinguished black historian traces the history of African-Americans from the years of pre-colonial exploration through the turbulent period of slavery, rebellion, "emancipation," and the halting social progress of the early 20th century. View More...
The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, historians often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled. In this powerful collection, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, ... View More...
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 stagger... View More...
The first and definitive biography of one of America's bestselling, notorious, and influential writers of the twentieth century: Iceberg Slim, n Robert Beck, author of the multimillion-copy memoir Pimp and such equally popular novels as Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. From a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of "street lit" masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of "blaxploitation" culture. You can't understand contemporary ... View More...
American political thought has been shaped by those who fought back against social inequality, economic exclusion, the denial of political representation, and slavery, the country's original sin. Yet too often the voices of African American resistance have been neglected, silenced, or forgotten. In this timely book, Alex Zamalin considers key moments of resistance to demonstrate its current and future necessity, focusing on five activists across two centuries who fought to foreground slavery and racial injustice in American political discourse. Struggle on Their Minds shows how the core values... View More...
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Time... View More...
Some sticker remnants on side and back, some chaffing on outer edges, and with some writing and underlining on some pages but not majority. Otherwise fully intact View More...
Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines's now-classic novel--written as an autobiography--spans one hundred years of Miss Jane's remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope--as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane's eloquent narrativ... View More...
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is an extraordinary window into the black freedom struggle in the United States, offering a treasure trove of fresh archival information about the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975 and vivid portraits of some of its most dynamic participants, including Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael. "This powerful book linked to the poignant film is a grand contribution to our understanding of contemporary America." --Cornel West View More...
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is an extraordinary window into the black freedom struggle in the United States, offering a treasure trove of fresh archival information about the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975 and vivid portraits of some of its most dynamic participants, including Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael. "This powerful book linked to the poignant film is a grand contribution to our understanding of contemporary America." --Cornel West View More...
"An extraordinary history...Deeply researched, elegantly written...a towering achievement that will not be soon forgotten." --Brent Staples, New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - The Washington Post - Amazon Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded The Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern M... View More...
As part of a project on the status of African-Americans that was initiated by the William Monroe Institute for the Study of Black Culture at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, this volume takes a comprehensive look at the education of African-Americans, specifically early childhood through postsecondary education, and relevant public policy issues since 1940. The list of contributors to the study includes both white and black scholars who are affiliated with primarily urban institutions located in the Northwest, the South, and on the East Coast who are deeply committed to educational r... View More...
A dynamic and hip collective biography that presents forty-four of America's greatest movers and shakers, from Frederick Douglass to Aretha Franklin to Barack Obama, written by ESPN's TheUndefeated.com and illustrated with dazzling portraits by Rob Ball. Meet forty-four of America's most impressive heroes in this collective biography of African American figures authored by the team at ESPN's TheUndefeated.com. From visionaries to entrepreneurs, athletes to activists, the Fierce 44 are beacons of brilliance, perseverance, and excellence. Each short biography is accompanied by a compelling por... View More...
The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race--collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation--are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify" (USA TODAY). In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Ra... View More...
One of The New York Times's 11 Books we Recommend This Week One of Oprah Daily's 20 of the Best Books to Pick Up This May One of The Oklahoman's 15 books to help you learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre as the 100-year anniversary approachesAs seen in documentaries on History Channel and CNN/Lebron James' Spring Hill Productions And then they were gone. More than one-thousand homes and businesses. Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors' offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air. Over the course of less than twenty-four hours i... View More...
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly."--Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO(R) STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE - ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN), "DEFINING" (LITHUB), AND "BEST" (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE - ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS - WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - Entertainment Weekly - O: T... View More...
Edited and with Notes by Shelly EversleyIntroduction by Robert Reid-Pharr In this truly astonishing eighteenth-century memoir, Olaudah Equiano recounts his remarkable life story, which begins when he is kidnapped in Africa as a boy and sold into slavery and culminates when he has achieved renown as a British antislavery advocate. The narrative "is a strikingly beautiful monument to the startling combination of skill, cunning, and plain good luck that allowed him to win his freedom, write his story, and gain international prominence," writes Robert Reid-Pharr in his Introduction. "He alerts us ... View More...
A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking writing on race in America--including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more--with a foreword by Jelani CobbThis latest anthology from the pages of the New Yorker is a bold and telling portrait of Black life in America, featuring astonishing early work from Rebecca West's account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind" (later retitled "The Fire Next Time") to more recent writing by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, Malcol... View More...
The Messenger was the third most popular magazine of the Harlem Renaissance after The Crisis and Opportunity. Unlike the other two magazines, The Messenger was not tied to a civil rights organization. Labor activist A. Philip Randolph and economist Chandler Owen started the magazine in 1917 to advance the cause of socialism to the black masses. They believed that a socialist society was the only one that would be free from racism. The socialist ideology of The Messenger the only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes, was reflected in the pieces and authors publish... View More...
Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot' and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." --Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book ha... View More...
