African Studies

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.

The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north.

Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did over the four decades in which he composed them. Longtime Baldwin fans and especially those just discovering his genius will appreciate this essential collection of his great nonfiction writing. Along with 46 additional pieces, it includes the full text of dozens of famous essays from such books as:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.

"The Year of Birmingham", 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with Black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative....

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s education system in a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher-ed course materials. Sifting through a wealth of materials, from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

The inside story of how a courageous FBI informant helped to bring down the KKK organization responsible for a brutal civil rights-era killing, When Evil Lived in Laurel plumbs the nature and harrowing consequences of institutional racism, and brings fresh light to this chapter in the history of civil rights in the South - one with urgent implications for today.

Distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

Before Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King was identified with Moses, African Americans identified those who challenged racial oppression in America with Samson. In Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon, Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper tell the story of how this biblical character became an icon of African American literature.

In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.

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.

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.

When The Real Housewives of New York City hired its first black cast member after more than 13 years on the air, attorney, speaker, and journalist Eboni K. Williams knew that the public would consider her a diversity hire. But instead of accepting the label, Williams re-envisioned her role as a “Diversity Higher,” an opportunity to prove the significance of Black excellence in the workspace and in society at-large. In this book, she shares all the benefits and advantages that have helped her and many others historically reach great heights in their careers and beyond.

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions - and university responses to them - expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.

THIS BOOK SHOWCASES EXISTING PROBLEMS WITHIN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY THAT ARE EXACERBATED BY ITS OVER-RELIANCE ON A VERY FLAWED CHILD SUPPORT SYSTEM. Bestselling author and social critic Demico Boothe shares his personal story of being wrongfully convicted of a crime, being sent to federal prison, and coming out of prison only to have to immediately deal with a hostile child support system that seemed intent on sending him back to prison over money he didn't have. Boothe shares how the current child support system poorly served him and his family and identifies and analyzes many ...

The powerful legacy of classical education among Black intellectuals and teachers in America is a national treasure with the capacity to bless teachers and students the world over! In The Black Intellectual Tradition, authors Dr. Anika Prather and Dr. Angel Adams Parham introduce us to readers, writers, teachers, artists, and people of action who loved, taught, and put into practice the wisdom and virtue of the great voices who came before.

In the summer of 2020, when the nation was erupting in protest over the murder of George Floyd, Chad Sanders was quietly celebrating for selfish reasons. Why? After years of struggling to get his footing as a writer, he’d finally landed a New York Times op-ed. He wrote an essay about the hollow messages of concern he’d been receiving from white friends and colleagues. It went viral, and in the years that followed, he built a solid career as a creator—of books, podcasts, TV shows, and films—by mining his most painful experiences of being Black in America.

It is 1937, and Laura Ann Langston lives in an America divided—between those who work the mystical arts and those who do not. Ever since the Great Rust, a catastrophic event that blighted the arcane force called the Dynamism and threw America into disarray, the country has been rebuilding for a better future. And everyone knows the future is industry and technology—otherwise known as Mechomancy—not the traditional mystical arts.

The mysteries of melanin reach back into ancient times and extend into every aspect of our universe. Long mistaken has melanin simply been referenced as "darker skin pigmentation"; however, we know the ancient Kemetic sciences prove melanin is much more. Raise your awareness and gain knowledge of self as we explore the cosmos and discover the divine relationship of melanated beings and the galaxy. Inside, you will discover the vast array of stimulating facts and case studies regarding melanated beings.