African American Science

This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.

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.

Earth is a distant memory. Habitable extrasolar planets are still out of reach. For generations, humanity has been clinging to survival by establishing colonies within enormous vacuum-breathing space beasts and mining their resources to the point of depletion. Rash, dreamy, and unconventional, Seske Kaleigh should be preparing for her future role as clan leader, but her people have just culled their latest beast, and she’s eager to find the cause of the violent tremors plaguing their new home.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This audiobook provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development.

Derrick Bell is perhaps best known for the principled stand he took at Harvard in 1990 when he quit his tenured position on the law-school faculty to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to a black woman. Now a visiting professor at New York Law School, Bell is still deeply interested in issues of race relations and has chosen to explore the subject fictionally in "Afrolantica Legacies." In a nutshell, the story goes like this: a mysterious land mass suddenly appears in the Atlantic Ocean, a fabulous island on which only black people can survive.

On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city's streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders' criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can't Wait.

In Before the Streetlights Come On, climate activist Heather McTeer Toney insists that those most affected by climate change are best suited to lead the movement for climate justice. McTeer Toney brings her background in politics, community advocacy, and leadership in environmental justice to this revolutionary exploration of why and how Black Americans are uniquely qualified to lead national and global conversations around systems of racial disparity and solutions to the climate crisis.

Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region's ecological complexities.

Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

In late September 1919, black sharecroppers met to protest unfair settlements for their cotton crops from white plantation owners. Local law enforcement broke up the union's meeting, and the next day a thousand white men from the Delta - and troops of the US Army itself - converged on Phillips County, Arkansas, to "put down" the black sharecroppers' "insurrection". Writer and Delta native Grif Stockley considers the evidence and tells the full story of this incident for the first time, concluding that black people were murdered in Elaine by white mobs and federal soldiers.

Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work - essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more - to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The audiobook presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm: Listeners will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to insightful infographics.

W. E. B. Du Bois was the foremost Black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk, his most influential work, is a collection of 14 beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. Here, Du Bois records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of black America, and explores the paradoxical "double-consciousness" of African American life.

In this ambitious - even radical - literary collection, first published in 1920, civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois tackled race, gender, art, politics, labor, and economics from the perspective of an African American who, in his own words, had “been in the world, but not of it.” Du Bois took an experimental approach in Darkwater - utilizing essays, poetry, spirituals, sketches, and autobiographical writings - to break new ground on issues of race, class, and prejudice that continue to confound us.

The history of African-Americans has been complicated and controversial. While some will fight against racism, others deny the severity of it throughout the ages. Whether or not the issue is as serious as it used to be, is a separate topic for debate. In this guide, you will not listen much about opinions but about facts. Society has come a long way since the inauguration of slavery and suppression of the minority in the United States.

"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.

Learn about the bomb blast that rocked the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, killing four young girls.

What J. D. Vance did for Appalachia with Hillbilly Elegy, CNN analyst and one of the youngest state representatives in South Carolina history Bakari Sellers does for the rural South, in this important book that illuminates the lives of America’s forgotten Black working-class men and women. Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South's past, present, and future.

A revolution has swept through the islands of Hans Lollik, and former slave Loren Jannik has been chosen to lead the survivors in a bid to free the islands forever. But the rebels are running out of food, weapons, and options. And as the Fjern inch closer to reclaiming Hans Lollik with every battle, Loren is faced with a choice that could shift the course of the revolution in their favor - or doom it to failure.

In Washington D.C., during his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, Dr. Martin L. King Jr. introduced the world to his dream. The passion of his dream was so intense that it still echoes throughout the World. With a dream big enough to influence listeners for over four decades, do you ever wonder what became of the children of the dream? The Native African American Cultural Development Guide answers this question and offers much more to its listener.