From #blacklivesmatter to black liberation (expanded second edition)

This updated and expanded edition of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 's groundbreaking book features a new chapter and a foreword by Angela Y. Davis.

Colored insane

Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.”

Afterlives of the plantation

Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’s vision of agrarian worldmaking.

Residual

Writing alongside the specter of premature death, Tisa Bryant traces the contours of Black women’s interior lives and domestic spaces through meditations on literature, cinema, installations, and archival research to reaffirm her own way of being.In the long aftermath of her mother’s death, Tisa ...

The philadelphia negro

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those...

Hollywood's others

Hollywood’s Others explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified—but only up to a point.

The minneapolis reckoning

An urgent account of why it’s so difficult to reform the policeThe eruption of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in 2014 spurred a wave of police reform. One of the places to embrace this reform was Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city long known for its liberal politics. Yet in May 2...

Welcoming ruin

The first full-length study of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and its afterlives.

Democracy and beauty

Robert Gooding-Williams reconstructs W. E. B. Du Bois’s defense of the political potential of beauty to challenge oppressive systems and foster an inclusive democracy.

Scattered and fugitive things

Winner: St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, Merle Curti Intellectual History Award, Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award, Arline Custer Memorial Book AwardHonorable Mention: Lawrence W. Levine Award, S-USIH Annual Book PrizeFinalist: ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and C...

Irreparable evil

Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations.

The sisterhood

The Sisterhood tells the story of how a remarkable community of Black women writers transformed American writing and cultural institutions.

The new negro

An authoritative anthology tracing the history of one of the most important concepts Black people drew on to challenge the brutal, totalizing system of Jim Crow racismThis book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the “New Negro,” charting how generations of thinkers debated it...

Black corona

In Black Corona, Steven Gregory examines political culture and activism in an African-American neighborhood in New York City. Using historical and ethnographic research, he challenges the view that black urban communities are "socially disorganized." Gregory demonstrates instead how working-class...

Black land

The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesAs the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held...

The darkened light of faith

A powerful new account of what a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American activists, intellectuals, and artists can teach us about democracyCould the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to reject America’s democr...

Kafka's son

Red stained

Black actress and activist Hilda Simms was a rising star on the stage and screen in post–WWII America until accusations of un-Americanism and communist sympathies derailed her career. Hilda Simms emerged as an actress at a time when segregation was deeply entrenched in Hollywood and on Broadwa...

Too much midnight

Krista Franklin’s work emerges at the intersection of poetics, popular culture, and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora.

Watch my smoke

Eric Dickerson is the record-holder for most rushing yards in a season, and his prime was the best of any running back in NFL history. Yet an aura of negativity trailed him his entire career.

Abolition

A major collection of essays and speeches from pioneering freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promise...

Assata taught me

Incisive analysis of the history and politics of Black liberation struggle by radical scholar Donna Murch.

#sayhername

An urgent call to change the story of police violence against women and girls.

Black liberation and socialism

A sharp and insightful analysis of movements against racism, with essential lessons for today's struggles.

The billboard

As a play and book, The Billboard is a cultural force that treats abortion as more than pro-life or pro-choice.

La comunidad como rebelión

A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color. Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia.  Much like other women scholars of color, Lorg...

Electric arches

Original meditations on race, gender, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up, from a distinctive new voice.

Community as rebellion

A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color.

The john carlos story

John Carlos, the man behind the most iconic moment of the Black Power movement, tells his story.

My people are rising

A compelling look at the rise and fall of the Black Panther generation, through the eyes of a founding member.

Imagine being more afraid of freedom than slavery

An incendiary literary work more relevant now than ever.“if anger were an ax/it would split me open/and if this is a sermon/let it be my granddaddy’s sermon/my grandmother’s foottapping/steady rocking/choir singing” —from "It Is Not a New Age"First published in 1998, Imagine Being More Afraid of ...

Who can afford to improvise?

Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? retraces the full arc of James Baldwin’s passage across the pages and stages of his career amplifying our sense of his...

Black arts, black muslims

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as we...

The souths in her

Nicole M. Morris Johnson analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Ntozake Shange, among others, showing how unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of m...

The lowest freedom

The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow.

Black intellectuals and black society

This book presents the trailblazing political scientist Martin L. Kilson’s essays on leading Black intellectuals of the twentieth century.

I hear freedom

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience.

Out to defend ourselves

The book provides a social history of Montreal’s first Haitian street gang and the changing city in which it emerged.

Inequality and african-american health

This book shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research h...

Reparations and anti-black racism

The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the state violence and social devaluation that Black populations continue to suffer. Police shootings and incarceration inequalities in the US and UK are just two examples of the legacy of slavery today. This book offers a criminological exploration of...

Critical race theory and the search for truth

This book presents a comprehensive exploration of Critical Race Theory, offering a clear understanding of its origins, the way it has been problematized and its potential for societal change. By examining the historical influence of imperialism and capitalism, the author critiques both liberal a...

Thinking through crisis

Winner, 2020 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language AssociationHonorable Mention, MSA First Book PrizeIn Thinking Through Crisis, James Edward Ford III examines the works of Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes during the 1930s in ord...

Uncle

Antebellum posthuman

From the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” to the Civil Rights-era declaration “I AM a Man,” antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of black humanity. It has done so, however, even as the very definition of the human has been called into quest...

Educational reconstruction

Book explores the post-Civil War creation of African American public schools in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Urban African Americans and their partners redefined American citizenship, created essential educational resources, and ensured that children had access to a quality education ...

Scandalize my name

From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel, to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situ...

The problem of the color line at the turn of the twentieth century

The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays assembles essential essays by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois – thinker, writer, scholar, activist, leader – from half a dozen years on each side, respectively, of the turning of the twentieth century,...

The rat that got away

The Rat That Got Away is an inspiring story of one man’s odyssey from the streets of the Bronx to a life as a professional athlete and banker in Europe, but it is also provides a unique vantage point on the history of the Bronx and sheds new light on a neglected period in American urban history. ...

Too great a burden to bear

This work focuses on Bureau agents at a more personal level. The answers illuminate who officials believed qualified–or not–to oversee the freedpeople’s transition to freedom. Officials in Texas desired those able to meet emancipation’s challenges. That meant northern-born, mature, white men from...