African Studies

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

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.

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism, and selected correspondences, including more than 30 previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. This volume will introduce a new generation to an educator, intellectual, and activist whose prescient insights underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American activism.

Read by the author. Do you feel like you live life looking in from the outside? From the way you speak, to the color of your skin, to the way you vote, or the way you pray, you don't fit the mold. And yet you find yourself still trying to prove yourself to others. In Set Me Free, New York Times...

Return To Source invites Black people around the world to reconnect with their lost heritage and findhealing, self-love and transformation.This audiobook is an empowering call to journey home to a new way of looking after yourself. A new way thatis, in fact, the old way.Globally, Africans and...

At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip-hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip-hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood.

A New York Times Notable Book Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Christian Gauss Award for Outstanding Books in Literary Scholarship “Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought...

The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New Orleans Voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender.

Based on the African American Women's Voices Project, Shifting reveals that a large number of African American women feel pressure to compromise their true selves as they navigate America's racial and gender bigotry. Black women "shift" by altering the expectations they have for themselves or their outer appearance....

In 1972, during the Black Power Movement, iconoclast Dick Gregory challenged one of the foundations of America itself - its history, which had been written almost exclusively from the white male perspective. In No More Lies, this true trailblazer gave voice to African Americans, speaking their truth about the past and race relations in the United States. No More Lies offers this incomparable satirist’s intellectual, conspiratorial, and humorous spin on the facts.

This riveting historical narrative reconstructs the armed resistance of Black activists, their challenge of racist terrorism, and their fight for human rights.

Twelve Years a Slave is the true story of Solomon Northup: born a free black man in New York State, and sold into slavery after being tricked in 1841. Unable to convince anyone he is not a slave, Solomon spent 12 years in bondage, before finally being set free. Northup’s memoir, recounting details of the slave markets and the harsh life on plantations, was used in the struggle to abolish slavery in the United States.

After the 1969 season, the St. Louis Cardinals traded their star center fielder, Curt Flood, to the Philadelphia Phillies, setting off a chain of events that would change professional sports forever. At the time there were no free agents, no no-trade clauses. When a player was traded, he had to report to his new team or retire. Unwilling to leave St. Louis and influenced by the civil rights movement, Flood chose to sue Major League Baseball for his freedom.

An approachable guide to being an informed, compassionate, and socially conscious person today—from discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation to disability, class, and beyond—from critically-acclaimed historian, educator, and author Blair Imani. We live in a time where it...

Mississippi, 1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by a white mob after making flirtatious remarks to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Till's attackers were never convicted, but his lynching became one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history. It launched protests across the country, helped the NAACP gain thousands of members, and inspired famous activists like Rosa Parks to stand up and fight for equal rights for the first time.

How does a white kid from the New York suburbs, harmonica in hand, end up earning himself a busker's spot on the Harlem sidewalks next to Mr. Satan, a Mississippi-born legend? How did an interracial blues duo fare on the streets of New York during a turbulent, fractious time marked by racially-motivated murders in Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and Crown Heights?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolent resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."

When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument that the evidence for the affair has been denied a fair hearing.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a foreword by...