Showing titles in Black & African American

A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of more than 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network.

A soulful collection of illuminating essays and interviews that explore Black people’s spiritual and scientific connection to the land, waters, and climate, curated by the acclaimed author of Farming While Black Author of Farming While Black and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, Leah Penniman...

The 20th-anniversary edition of Kelley’s influential history of 20th-century Black radicalism, with new reflections on current movements and their impact on the author, and a foreword by poet Aja Monet First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical...

"From Superman to Man" is not just a critique of racial prejudices but also an empowerment tool. By dismantling stereotypes and celebrating black accomplishments, the book seeks to uplift the African-American community. It remains a relevant historical document, capturing the zeitgeist of its era and contributing to the ongoing discourse on race and identity. Rogers' dedication to dismantling stereotypes and promoting a more inclusive understanding of African-American history is evident throughout the text, making the book a significant contribution to the broader conversation on racial issues in America.

Black women are heading to college in record numbers, and more and more Black women are teaching in higher education. But these statistics don’t guarantee our safety there. Willpower and grit may improve achievement for Black people in school, but they don’t secure our belonging. In fact, the very structure of higher education ensures that we’re treated as guests, outsiders to the institutional family—outnumbered and unwelcome.

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

In Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle tells - for the first time - the story of a place both mythic and real: Black Hollywood. Spanning 60 years, this deliciously entertaining history uncovers the audacious manner in which many Blacks made a place for themselves in an industry that originally had no place for them. Through interviews and the personal recollections of Hollywood luminaries, Bogle pieces together a remarkable history that remains largely obscure to this day.

Mathabane argues that the reason many Americans are turned off by the current divisive racial dialogue is because the discussion has mostly been about the politics of race and avoids the elephant in the room - - what each of us can do to become agents for racial healing. His solution is for people to learn to speak the language of Ubuntu, a Zulu word for common humanity.

The historical significance of Barack Obama's triumph in the presidential election of 2008 scarcely requires comment. Yet it contains an irony: He won a victory as an African American only by denying that he was the candidate of African Americans. Obama's very success, writes Fredrick Harris, exacted a heavy cost on black politics.

In The Price of the Ticket, Harris puts Obama's career in the context of decades of black activism, showing how his election undermined the very movement that made it possible.

Black women are beautiful, intelligent and capable —but mostly they embrace strong. Esteemed clinical psychologist, Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, praises the strength of women, while exploring how trauma and adversity have led to deep emotional pain and shaped how they walk through the world...

There have been numerous books about the why, when, and where of slavery in America, but there is a dearth of material exposing what slavery was actually like. In The Great Stain, researcher Noel Rae frames firsthand accounts from former slaves, slave owners, and even African slavers. Rae exposes the commerce and culture of slavery, not only from an economic or moral standpoint but also through multitudinous perspectives within it: a young girl is beaten after being accused of stealing a piece of candy, a slave ship's surgeon recounts brutal treatment and squalid conditions.

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment.

When we think of slavery, most of us think of the American South. We think of back-breaking fieldwork on plantations. We don't think of slavery in the North, nor do we think of the grueling labor of urban and domestic slaves. Rachel May's rich new book explores the far reach of slavery, from New England to the Caribbean, the role it played in the growth of mercantile America, and the bonds between the agrarian South and the industrial North in the antebellum era - all through the discovery of a remarkable quilt.

Published in 1861, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiographical account of the author's experiences as a slave in 19th-century North Carolina, from her relatively happy childhood to the brutality she experienced as a teenager and young woman to her eventual escape to the North.

From celebrated Congressman John Lewis comes an eyewitness account of history from a key member of the Civil Rights Movement and confidant to Martin Luther King Jr. In turbulent times Americans look to the Civil Rights Movement as the apotheosis of political expression. As we confront a...

In Black Feminism Reimagined, Jennifer C. Nash reframes Black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence.

The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about...

Born into “the blessings of liberty in a free State,” Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Bayou Boeuf region of Louisiana’s Red River Valley. Twelve Years a Slave is the chronicle of his captivity at the mercy of sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps, who tested Northup’s tenacity and self-control under the most brutal conditions. Until fate brought a Canadian abolitionist to Epps’s farm, Northup thought he would never draw another free breath.

Autobiography of Hall of Fame basketball star Clyde Drexler, one of basketball history's most dynamic players. Through his fifteen-year career as an NBA player, Clyde Drexler played with elegance and flair, leadership and poise, integrity and an ability to come through in the clutch. He led the Portland Trail Blazers to the NBA Finals twice and helped the Houston Rockets win the NBA championship in 1995. A ten-time All-Star, a member of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team, and now a member of basketball’s Hall of Fame, Drexler reached the top of his profession without revealing many of his inner thoughts on himself or the game.

Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.