African Studies

From its founding in 1966 to contemporary attempts to censure its history and revise its significance, the Black Panther party has aroused fear, hope, pride, vilification, and government-sponsored oppression. This is the first and only collection of the most vital, representative writings of the party. Here are Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Fred Hampton; Kathleen Cleaver and other Panther women; the party's court battles and acquittals; its positions on black separatism, the power structure, the police, violence, education, and more.

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.

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! explores Toronto’s role as a destination for thousands of freedom seekers before the American Civil War. This new edition traces pathways taken by people, enslaved and free, who courageously made the trip north in search of liberty and offers new biographies, images, and information, some of which is augmented by a 2015 archaeological dig in downtown Toronto.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A growing number of Americans want to tear down what it’s taken us 250 years to build—and they’ll start by canceling our shared history, ideals, and culture. Traditional areas of civic agreement are vanishing. We can’t agree on what makes America special. We...

First published in 1969, Black Theology and Black Power is the first systematic presentation of black theology that also introduced the voice of a young theologian who would shake the foundations of American theology. Relating the militant struggle for liberation with the gospel message of salvation, James Cone laid the foundations for an interpretation of Christianity from the perspective of the oppressed that retains its urgency and challenge today.

With the utterance of a single line—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”—a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformed into one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. But the true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley is one that has...

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.

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.

bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.

Here is an unapologetic look into the factors that have caused so many Blacks to think and act in the negative way they do towards themselves and others. This timely body of work is from a man well versed in the American educational system, as well as educational systems throughout the world.

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an Age of Neoslavery that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.

To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in "going beyond race", putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: Young Black men are an endangered species.

Now a Netflix film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, Farrah Mackenzie, Charlie Evans and Kevin Bacon. Written for the Screen and Directed by Sam Esmail. Executive Producers Barack and Michelle Obama, Tonia Davis, Daniel M. Stillman, Nick Krishnamurthy, Rumaan Alam A...

In this classic tale of adventure, a young American sea captain named James Riley, shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in 1815, was captured by a band of nomadic Arabs and sold into slavery. Thus begins an epic adventure of survival and a quest for freedom that takes him across the Sahara desert.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous Black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent White mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death.

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac - here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a Black elite concerned with distancing itself from Whites and the Black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain...

Even as feminism has become increasingly central to our ideas about institutions, relationships, and everyday life, the term used to diagnose the problem - patriarchy - is used so loosely that it has lost its meaning. In Vexy Thing Imani Perry resurrects patriarchy as a target of critique, re-centering it to contemporary discussions of feminism through a social and literary analysis of cultural artifacts from the Enlightenment to the present.