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...

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...

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...

Blackpentecostal breath

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy and visual studies,...

Discipline problems

Angel, a Black tenth-grader at a New York City public school, self-identifies as a nerd and likes to learn. But she’s troubled that her history classes leave out events like the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas, presenting a sugar-coated image of the United States t...

The many resurrections of henry box brown

On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Box Brown,” as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, mag...

Sporting justice

A history of the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win an Ontario amateur baseball title in 1934. Sporting Justice situates the team in a broader history of Black baseball in Chatham and southwestern Ontario, exploring themes including racism in sport, gender, class, and social ...

New york liberation school

In the 1960s and ’70s—when Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Guillermo Morales, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur all studied and taught at CUNY—New York City’s classrooms and streets radiated as epicenters of Black, Puerto Rican, queer, and women’s liber...

Prophetic leadership and visionary hope

Thirty years have passed since Cornel West’s book Race Matters rose to the top of the bestseller lists in 1993. Yet his book remains as relevant as ever to American culture—even more so, if one considers its influence on contemporary racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, prison jus...

Zapantera negra

An encounter between Emory Douglas of the Black Panthers and autonomous Indigenous and Zapatista communities helps us understand the role of revolutionary art in times of distress.

The nation on no map

A call for a radical transformation in the face of widespread crisis.

Making revolution

For the first time in paperback, a powerful and raw glimpse behind the scenes of the Black Panther Party Making Revolution is Don Cox’s revelatory, even incendiary account of his years in the Black Panther Party. He had participated in many peaceful Bay Area civil rights protests but hungered fo...

A short walk

A woman's odyssey from the rural south to Harlem explores the black American experience between 1900 to 1950.

Teahouse of the almighty

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders.From Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation’s premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a Na...

Next

Finalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "Clifton mythologizes herself: that is, she illuminated her surroundings and history from within in a way that casts light on much beyond."--The Women's Review of Books

Quilting

Brilliantly honed language, sharp rhythms and striking syntax empower Lucille Clifton's personal and artistic odyssey. Hers is poetry of birth, death, children, community, history, sexuality and spirituality, and she addresses these themes with passion, humor, anger and spiritual awe.

Twisted

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlock...

The collected poems of lucille clifton 1965-2010

Landmark volume containing all of Lucille Clifton's published work and 55 previously unpublished poems. Foreword by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison.

The meaning of freedom

First and only book of speeches on racism, community, freedom, and politics in the U.S. by international icon Angela Davis.

Dispatches from the race war

Essays on racial flashpoints, white denial, violence, and the manipulation of fear in America today."Drawing on events from the killing of Trayvon Martin to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, Wise calls to account his fellow white citizens and exhorts them to combat racist power structu...

What it means to be daddy

Absent fathers, the breakdown of the nuclear family, and single-mother households are often blamed for the poor quality of life experienced by many African American children. Jennifer F. Hamer challenges both the imposition of an inappropriate value system and the resulting ineffectual social pol...

Race and secularism in america

This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Contributors from a range of disciplines expose secularism’s prohibitive practices in all facets of American society a...

Hubert harrison

Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison's ideas profoundly infl...

Where are all the young men and women of color?

When it comes to social work practice in community outreach programs, in juvenile detention centres, in prisons, in parole and probation programs, and in the inner cities, Melvin Delgado asks the question: Where are all the young men and women of color? Although many urban residents, especially p...

The myth of the missing black father

Common stereotypes portray black fathers as being largely absent from their families. Yet while black fathers are less likely than white and Hispanic fathers to marry their child's mother, many continue to parent through cohabitation and visitation, providing caretaking, financial, and other in-k...

Way too cool

Follows the hollowing-out of "coolness" in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society

Electric santería

Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research, Beliso-De Jesús traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santería practitioners

Race in a bottle

At a ceremony announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, "I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more th...