Civil Rights History

In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal. “An incisive and rigorous assessment of how people arrive within a moment and what they can make out of it—or how they can take it apart.”—Hanif...

We all feel it, the teetering toward a place in America from which there is no return. The battle to remain hopeful in spite of injustice after injustice. In this powerful story of one lawyer’s fight for his community, both justice and hope are redeemed. The Greenwood neighborhood of North...

Top political strategist Maya Rupert reveals how, for people of color, being real comes at a cost and authenticity is a privilege the marginalized cannot afford—that is, unless we change the system that keeps sending us the bill. . . One of Maya Rupert’s earliest memories was learning how to...

The inspiring story of how we overcame a history of infectious disease, poisonous environments, and early death and unlocked an explosion in human potential—and a vision for the work ahead to optimize human flourishing in the twenty-first century “Michelle Williams understands what too many...

An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation’s greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers. During the tumultuous period between the era of the Founding Fathers and the disunion of the...

The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us. Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American...

“Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2014 International Latino Awards Finalist A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers the true story of an immigrant's murder that turned a quaint village on the...

An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Discover 365 reasons to love America as you read the storied history of the United States. The fife and drum of history mark the time of each passing day. And within their cadence, personalities, conflicts, discoveries, ideas, and nations peal and fade. American history...

Shaking up New York and national politics by becoming the first African American congresswoman and, later, the first Black major-party presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark as an "unbought and unbossed" firebrand and a leader in politics for meaningful change. Chisholm spent her formative years moving between Barbados and Brooklyn, and the development of her political orientation did not follow the standard narratives of the civil rights or feminist establishments.

From the three-time Coretta Scott King Honor winning author of The Skin I'm In comes a poignant story about a southern girl far from home at an elite girls boarding school in the north, who must find the courage to be herself and to dream of a brighter future, set against the backdrop of the...

From the award-winning author of Birth, a journey into the underground activist networks that have been working to protect women’s autonomy over their bodies amidst legal, political, religious, and cultural oppression over the past sixty years. In this definitive, eye-opening history...

The 27th United States Colored Troops (USCT), composed largely of free black Ohio men, served in the Union army from April 1864 to September 1865 in Virginia and North Carolina. It was the first time most members of the unit had traveled so far from home. The men faced daily battles against racism and inferior treatment, training, and supplies. They suffered from the physical difficulties of military life, the horrors of warfare, and homesickness and worried about loved ones left at home without financial support.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude.

Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. In Black-Owned...

Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era.

This book is an attempt to preserve in perpetuity the life of one of India’ s greatest constitutional lawyers, M.K. Nambiar. Written by his son and a legal luminary himself, K.K. Venugopal, this biography provides a fascinating account of Mr Nambiar’ s life. It not only describes the man but...

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A revelation . . . a book in the Caro mold, using Lady Bird, along with tapes and transcripts of her entire White House diary, to tell the history of America during the Johnson years.”—The New York Times The inspiration for the documentary film The Lady...

In the early 20th century, most African Americans still lived in the South, disenfranchised, impoverished, terrorized by white violence, and denied the basic rights of citizenship. As the Democrats swept into the White House on a wave of black defectors from the Party of Lincoln, a group of...