African Studies

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated.

New York Times best-selling, award-winning author, actor, and motivational speaker Hill Harper invites listeners to join the conversation about the breakdown of the African-American family. The black community of past generations found strength in families, but today’s black children have less than a one in three chance of being raised in a two-parent household. Harper’s search for answers to this phenomenon is an enlightening and empowering journey.

An NAACP Image Award nominee, The Black Male Handbook is an impassioned call to end the problems facing today's Black men. Author and activist Kevin Powell offers insights on steering away from violence and toward a more responsible manhood. A new climate is rising in the Black community. Despite a shared thirst for cutting-edge opportunities and fresh directions, today's hiphop generation is still plagued by many long-standing problems.

In the first half of the 20th century, Dunbar was an academically elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law. By the 1950s, Dunbar High School was sending 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as with too many troubled urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students struggle with reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells the story of the school’s rise, fall, and path toward resurgence.

In this stunningly illustrated essay collection inspired by the popular podcast Life, I Swear, prominent Black women reflect on self-love and healing, sharing stories of the trials and tribulations they’ve faced and what has helped them confront pain, heal wounds, and find connection.

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.

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.

The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. An enduring white supremacist myth claims brutal conditions in Black communities are mainly the result of Black people's collective choices and moral failings. But there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can't solve. Noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes listeners on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued.

Beginning with his final departure from Neverland, Untouchable takes listeners through Jackson's final four years, as he shuttled from California to the Middle East, Ireland, Asia, the East Coast, and Las Vegas, planning to recapture his wealth and reputation with a comeback album and a series of 50 mega-concerts, for which he was rehearsing until the day before his death. Sullivan has never-before-reported information about Jackson's business dealings and the pedophilia allegations that irreparably marked his reputation, and he had exclusive access to inner-circle figures.

The first book devoted to the history of African Americans in South Florida and their pivotal role in the growth and development of Miami, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century traces their triumphs, drudgery, horrors, and courage during the first 100 years of the city's history. Marvin Dunn combines exhaustive research in regional media and archives with personal interviews of pioneer citizens and longtime residents in a work that documents as never before the life of one of the most important Black communities in the United States.

In June 1985, a young Black man named Darryl Hunt was falsely convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of a white copyeditor at the local paper. Many in the community believed him innocent and crusaded for his release even as subsequent trials and appeals reinforced his sentence. Finally, in 2003, the tireless efforts of his attorney combined with an award-winning series of articles by Phoebe Zerwick in the Winston-Salem Journal led to the DNA evidence that exonerated Hunt.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in American history. This is the autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott by one of its principal organizers. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.

The Spirit of Harriet Tubman, who was called the Moses of her people, is rising again, and we can call forth her spirit to embody incredible strength and unwavering courage. Combining direct transmissions of Harriet's message with insightful explorations of her life and legacy, this extraordinary book gives us support and inspiration to deepen our roots of resilience and become powerful conductors of love and truth in our own lives.

Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this stunning new biography, award-winning author Wil Haygood surpasses the emotional impact of his inspiring best seller The Butler to detail the life and career of one of the most transformative legal minds of the past 100 years.

C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil rights fight. During the 1960s, Atwater and Ellis met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion. In an amazing set of transformations, however, each of them came to see how the other had been exploited by the South's rigid power structure.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between Black youth culture and the mass media.

Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslims, following them from West Africa to the Americas. Although many assume that what Muslim faith they brought with them to the Americas was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu, as Sylviane A. Diouf demonstrates in this meticulously researched, groundbreaking volume, Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This audiobook provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development.

The gripping story of 200 freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia to build a new colony - where the colonists' repression of the native tribes would beget a tragic cycle of violence. When a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter named Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa.

Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, Jesse McCarthy contends, "something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of Black art making". Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones.