African American

Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation....

In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa....

What is feminism?

In this short, accessible primer, Bell Hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her....

Best-selling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the social fabric....

In an era of stark racial injustice and decisive action, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to the struggle for change, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age 19. Through his eyes, we see the courage of a generation that stood up to injustice....

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms....

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward - and black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be....

Once in a great while a book comes along that radically changes our understanding of a crucial political issue and helps to fuel a social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book....

An approachable guide to being an informed, compassionate, and socially conscious person today - from discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation to disability, class, and beyond - from critically acclaimed historian, educator, and author Blair Imani....

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history....

Uncovering a cold-blooded execution at the hands of a conspiring police force, this engaging account relentlessly pursues the murderers of Black Panther Fred Hampton....

Year after year a seemingly unshakable reality of violence plagues Black communities nationwide....

Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world....

Jay-Z: Made in America is the fruit of Michael Eric Dyson’s decade of teaching the work of one of the greatest poets this nation has produced, as gifted a wordsmith as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Rita Dove....

The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era....

Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA's African American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program....

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy....

Author and entrepreneur Dennis Kimbro combines best-selling author Napoleon Hill's law of success with his own vast knowledge of business....

The Destruction of Black Civilization is revelatory and revolutionary because it offers a new approach to the research, teaching, and study of African history by shifting the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves....

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally....

Sandra Igwe shares her journey as a young Black mother, coping with sleepless nights, anxiety and loneliness after the birth of her first daughter....

Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the Robeson Justice Academy's marginalization of Black students with its pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on fieldwork and experience teaching there, Shange outlines how it fails its students and the community....

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs....

Black Americans have long been shackled to the Democrats. Seeing no viable alternative, they have watched liberal politicians take the Black vote for granted without pledging anything in return. In Blackout, Owens argues this automatic allegiance is both illogical and unearned....

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism, and selected correspondences, including more than 30 previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. This volume will introduce a new generation to an educator, intellectual, and activist whose prescient insights underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American activism.

Running from Bondage, Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America, explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. 

Black women continuously navigate systems that were never intended for them while playing by a set of rules they never agreed to or were ever trained for. In this book, Francine Parham shares her knowledge as a Black woman and a former global executive of two major corporations on how to move up in the workplace while maintaining a sense of sanity. The key skill—one that Black women are rarely taught—is understanding the power dynamics within your organization and learning how to “shift the power” to your advantage. 

In this booklet, we remember the tragedy of the Red Summer of 1919. 

The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. There were also slaves who ran and hid out, or who made their own settlements, who were called maroons. Some escapees joined together to establish lasting settlements in inaccessible areas in mountains and swamps, sometimes preferring death rather than being caught and enslaved again. Others hid temporarily.

The service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War is one of that conflict's most stirring, if still not completely understood, aspects. Riders in the Storm covers the story of the African-American cavalrymen of the 5th Massachusetts. Where the infantry regiments recruited largely free Blacks from the North, the 5th focused on escaped slaves, who it was believed would be better horsemen. Not only would the former slaves be fighting for themselves, but they would be fighting to liberate loved ones still enslaved. 

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

The 2nd Ranger Infantry Company (Airborne) was the first and only all-black Ranger unit in the history of the United States Army. Edward Posey's The US Army's First, Last, and Only All-Black Rangers is the first complete history of this elite all-volunteer unit. As a member, Posey bases his account on firsthand experience, official records, interviews with survivors, and other material to produce a rich and worthy addition to the growing literature on the Korean War. Now the world will learn the true story of the United States Army's first, only, and last all-black Ranger unit.

In this harrowing autobiography, Henry Bibb recounts his journey from the bonds of slavery to his fight for freedom in the Northern abolitionist movement. Born a slave in antebellum Kentucky, Bibb details his escape via the Underground Railroad to Canada and his struggle to free his wife and child, still in chains across the border, whatever the odds. His story is not only one of the most important narrative accounts of slavery in the United States but stands as a testament to the power of the human spirt and its zeal for liberty.

bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood. 

Following Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom, this third memoir by the iconic abolitionist expands on Douglass’s time in bondage, his escape, and his reinvention as an influential statesman—providing many details that, in earlier years, would have endangered himself and others. It also offers a fascinating window into Douglass’s political activism and his connections to major American figures of the mid-nineteenth century, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and three different US presidents.

Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city. 

A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation, America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities.

In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship—in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film—and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert."  

In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic.