African American Politics

In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.

Though the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were unified in their common idea of resistance to oppression, these groups fought their battles on multiple fronts.

From leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., to lesser-known figures such as Barbara Rose Johns and Jim Zwerg, each man and woman made the decision that something had to be done to stop discrimination. These moving accounts of the first decade of the civil rights movement are a tribute to the people, black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and the struggle they endured.

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights.

It was a mild May morning in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when a 23-year-old slave named Robert Smalls did the unthinkable and boldly seized a Confederate steamer. With his wife and two young children hidden on board, Smalls and a small crew ran a gauntlet of heavily armed fortifications in Charleston Harbor and delivered the valuable vessel and the massive guns it carried to nearby Union forces.

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

Military history's hidden figures are given their due in this revealing and moving exploration of the pivotal role of African Americans who risked their lives for their country - even as they fought courageously to become full citizens. A retired Lieutenant Colonel, Michael Lee Lanning covers Black soldiers' involvement in conflicts from the colonial days through more recent struggles of the 21st century.

A revelatory biography of the first Black woman to stand for Vice President, charting how the daughter of two immigrants in segregated California became one of this country’s most effective power players. There’s very little that’s conventional about Kamala Harris, and yet her personal...

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the US, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the US government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.

This groundbreaking and highly acclaimed work examines the two most influential African American leaders of the twentieth century. While Martin Luther King, Jr., saw America as "essentially a dream . . . as yet unfulfilled," Malcolm X viewed America as a realized nightmare. James Cone cuts through superficial assessments of King and Malcolm as polar opposites to reveal two men whose visions are complementary and moving toward convergence.

In Stupid Black Men, he takes on the mindset of those people who always capture the most media attention—as well as masses of public money—people who say that racism is the root of all problems and who end up hurting precisely those they claim to be helping.

A riveting, groundbreaking account of how the war on crime has torn apart inner-city communities. Forty years in, the tough-on-crime turn in American politics has spurred a prison boom of historic proportions that disproportionately affects Black communities. It has also torn at the lives of those on the outside. As arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance criminalize entire blocks, a climate of fear and suspicion pervades daily life, not only for young men entangled in the legal system but for their family members and working neighbors.

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history - a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the century since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes.

Black churches in America have long been recognized as the most independent, stable, and dominant institutions in Black communities. Drawing on interviews with more than 1,800 Black clergy in both urban and rural settings, combined with a comprehensive historical overview of seven mainline Black denominations, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya present an analysis of the Black church as it relates to the history of African Americans and to contemporary Black culture.

An “assiduously researched” (The Wall Street Journal), “powerful...dispassionate new biography” (The Christian Science Monitor) of Woodrow Wilson, focused on his role in the long national struggle for racial equality and women’s voting rights. More than a century after his death...

Sistah Vegan is a series of narratives, critical essays, poems, and reflections from a diverse community of North American Black-identified vegans. Collectively, these activists are de-colonizing their bodies and minds via whole-foods veganism.

Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small—a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic “A master class in disrupting a stubborn...

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's acclaimed Racism Without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, there lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for - and ultimately justify - racial inequalities.