African American Science

Sabrena Collins feels her life is finally coming together, now that her abusive ex-husband is a distant memory. She has a good job, two wonderful daughters, and a best friend who is more like a sister. And then there's the gentle and generous Steve, who is everything her ex wasn't. But what about the lonely nights when the phone doesn't ring?

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people - two-thirds black and one-third white - held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day - the peak of the movement - Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington.

From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States - a journey that transformed more than 70 Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny.

In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily-white business world, he married a White woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally he set his White contemporaries' teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them.

Through over ten years of research, interviewing activists along with unprecedented access to their personal archives, Tracy and Sonnie tell a crucial, untold story of the New Left. Their deeply sourced narrative history shows how poor and working-class individuals from diverse ethnic, rural and urban backgrounds cooperated and drew strength from one another. The groups they founded redefined community organizing, and transformed the lives and communities they touched.

Confronted by a crisis in black American leadership, state-sanctioned violence against black communities, and colorblind laws that trap black Americans in a racial caste system, Black Lives Matter activists and the artists inspired by them have devised new forms of political and cultural resistance. More Than Our Pain explores how affect and emotion can drive collective political and cultural action in the face of a new nadir in race relations in the United States. Affect and emotion have moved from the margin to the center of this new human rights movement.

"The Year of Birmingham", 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with Black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative....

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within 24 hours of the discovery of the murder, would be inextricably linked in the nation's imagination to an exceptionally brutal, modern-day lynching. In this superbly written examination of the murder and its aftermath, award-winning journalist Joyce King brings us on a journey that begins at the crime scene.

A provocative look at what it means to be Black today. This audiobook includes excerpts from over 100 interviews with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, NY Gov. David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and others.

Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering, and often fetid, conditions of plantation house kitchens.

The story of America and African Americans is a story of hope and inspiration and unwavering courage. Kadir Nelson's award-winning Heart and Soul is about the men, women, and children who toiled in the hot sun picking cotton; it's about the America ripped in two by Jim Crow laws; it's about...

The school careers of two teenage girls who lived across town from each other - one black, one white - were altered by a court-ordered desegregation plan for Durham, NC in 1970. LaHoma and Cindy both found themselves at the same high school from different sides of a court-ordered racial “balancing act”. This plan thrust each of them involuntarily out of their comfort zones and into new racial landscapes. Their experiences, recounted in alternating first-person narratives, are the embodiment of desegregation policies, situated in a particular time and place.

In Moving Up, Moving Out, Will Cooley discusses the damage racism and discrimination have exacted on black Chicagoans in the 20th century, while accentuating the resilience of upwardly mobile African Americans. Cooley examines how class differences created fissures in the black community and produced quandaries for black Chicagoans interested in racial welfare. While black Chicagoans engaged in collective struggles, they also used individualistic means to secure the American Dream.

The year is 2059, and the country is prospering technologically and socially. There is very little crime; the educational system is superb, and the government is seemingly uncorrupt. So why do terrorists continue to attack government institutions and innocent people? What do these people want? The answer: freedom.

When young Jammal (a.k.a. Prince Menzuo) found out that he was adopted and from another planet, his true destiny as the new Universal Protector was revealed. After saving the Earth from one very dangerous pirate warrior named Morbid, Menzuo is ready to continue his preparation to become the true Universal Protector.

"I have a dream." When those words were spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the crowd stood, electrified, as Martin Luther King, Jr. brought the plight of African Americans to the public consciousness and firmly established himself as one of the greatest orators of all time. Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nationis a thrilling, behind-the-scenes account of the weeks leading up to the great event, as told by Clarence Jones, co-writer of the speech and close confidant to King.

Nothing but Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government.

Miss America, can we really close a 100,000 dollar gap that has been driven by race? The better question is: How did our country get here? The sad question is: Did you even know this racially fed wealth gap existed? Time has been up; let's talk about it. This book dissects American history and explores biased laws and fundamentals that caused the racial wealth gap plaguing the economy and Black America.

"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.

In African American communities, mental health concerns often simmer silently beneath the surface, eclipsed by societal stigma and historical trauma. The legacy of systemic oppression and racial injustice compounds the challenges, fostering a culture of stoicism where seeking help is viewed as a sign of weakness. Addressing these silent struggles necessitates destigmatizing mental health, fostering open dialogue, and providing culturally competent support systems.