African Studies

Sometimes the person you most need is the one least like you. Kathryn Davies is a bright young woman from a prominent Phoenix family. But after making a leap of faith at a Christian music fest, dropping out of med school, and moving to inner city Chicago, her family all but disowns her. When Kat...

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, was about to extend its tendrils northward. Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.

In the vibrant tapestry of humanity, "Nature Knows No Color-Line" unravels the threads of shared ancestry across continents and time. This groundbreaking work challenges rigid racial lines, exposing the myths of purity and celebrating the interconnectedness of our roots. Prepare to embark on a captivating journey through history, anthropology, and genetics, where evidence whispers a powerful truth: skin may differ, but beneath it all, we bloom from the same soil.

"Narrator Adam Lazarre-White conveys Cooper's youth and aspirations in a rich, steady voice that suggests emotional authenticity and humor." -- AudioFile Magazine Now a documentary narrated by Common, produced by Grant Hill, Dwyane Wade, and 9th Wonder, from filmmaker Mary Mazzio The moving true...

"Black people are not dark-skinned white people," says advertising visionary Tom Burrell. In fact, they are much more. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of "No way!" At this...

From “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison)—the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God—a collection of remarkable stories, including eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time. New York Times’ Books to...

"You know what our party thinks? 'We're good people with good ideas. That's enough, isn't it?' Being tough enough, mean enough, and vicious enough is just not what they want." Well, tough, mean, and vicious isn't just for Karl Rove anymore. In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party decisively ended 12 years of electoral humiliation by seizing back Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin' is the story of that historic victory, and the one man at the center on whom everything hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel.

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with Black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the Black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of Black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between White progressives, business interests, and Black Atlantans. But Atlanta's political leadership has consistently mishandled the Black poor.

Experience life to the fullest with an intentional alignment to God's rule and power. Bestselling author and beloved pastor Tony Evans writes about the Holy Spirit's power that is within us and how we can release it to greatly impact the kingdom of God both now and for eternity. Tony Evans is...

Sundown Towns examines thousands of all-white American towns that were - and still are, in some instances - racially exclusive by design.

The story of black professional baseball provides a remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history: the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional baseball teams and leagues operated for decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.

A breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones' viral video, “How Can We Win.” “So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made...

A groundbreaking exploration of grief and racial trauma through the eyes of a Black end-of-life caregiver. Most of us understand grief as sorrow experienced after a loss--the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or a change in life circumstance. Breeshia Wade approaches grief as...

A beginner’s guide to an inclusive Hoodoo practice--history, spellwork, folklore, and herbs Hoodoo is a folklore tradition that was created by and for enslaved African Americans in the southern United States. And before there were honey jars, red brick dust, and everything else you may...

Feminism and atheism are “dirty words” that Americans across the political spectrum love to debate - and hate. Throw them into a blender and you have a toxic brew that supposedly defies decency, respectability, and Americana. Putting gender at the center of the equation, progressive “Religious Nones” of color are spearheading an anti-racist, social justice humanism that disrupts the “colorblind” ethos of European American atheist and humanist agendas, which focus principally on church-state separation.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.

“In all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading with Patrick.”—The Atlantic A memoir of the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student, jailed for murder in the...

Joining the ranks of Evicted and The New Jim Crow, a former caseworker’s searing, clear-eyed investigation of the child welfare system—from foster care to incarceration—that exposes the deep-rooted biases shaping the system, witnessed through the lives of several Black families. Dr...

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the Black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding Black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of Blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer Black college graduates than would otherwise exist.

At a time when most of the public discourse was dominated by men, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings offered a blistering rebuke to that status quo. The essays and speeches collected here anticipated the debates about racism, sexism, and intersectionality that we are still having today. Cooper argues in particular for the importance of Black women’s participation in identifying and combating the structures of oppression that surrounded them - and that made life so much more difficult for many other groups as well.