Black & African American

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot comes a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans....

There’s Always This Year is a poignant, personal reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history....

A self-care guidebook full of activities for Black men everywhere pursuing joy, creating connections, confronting racism, and working through intergenerational trauma....

Much of America did not know the radical King - and too few know today - but the FBI and US government did. They called him "the most dangerous man in America"....

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....

The most toxic racial arguments share one of five traits. They try to erase Black history, prioritize white victimhood, deny Black oppression, promote myths of Black inferiority, or rebrand racism as something else entirely....

A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

The Color of Water touches listeners of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son....

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship....

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

This book illuminates why Lincoln’s unprecedented welcoming of African American men and women to the White House transformed the trajectory of race relations in the United States....

From New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Dowling Taylor comes this riveting chronicle of a critical yet overlooked chapter in American history: the inspiring rise and calculated fall of the Black elite, from Emancipation through Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era....

Dear Black Girls is a necessary and meaningful exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in America today—and a rallying cry to lift up women and girls everywhere....

In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a compelling 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, told by an award-winning journalist on her decade-long search for sanity in America’s mental healthcare system....

Prioritize your well-being with these 150 self-care exercises designed specifically to help Black women revitalize their outlook on life, improve their mental health, eliminate stress, and self-advocate....

Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society....

A moving combination of memoir, psychology, and practical tools, this book offers Black men guidance and support for reclaiming mental well-being and finding whole, full-hearted living....

The Color of Compromise takes listeners on a historical journey: from America's early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, to today's Black Lives Matter movement....

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

An African History of Africa has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's history.

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.

Contrary to competing popular beliefs, police violence against African Americans has neither remained unchanged since the era of slavery nor is it a recent phenomenon disconnected from the past. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.

"Blacks are 13% but commit half of the crime!" Using statistics, facts, charts, arguments never heard before, and common sense, this book factually challenges many firmly held beliefs, such as “Blacks make up 13% of the population but commit half of the violent crimes.” Offering a comprehensive examination of street crime in America's inner cities, it navigates diverse topics with clarity. Drawing from various disciplines, the author explores how mental illness, systemic racism, black apathy, drugs, family breakdown, American values, and the financial gains from illicit activities fuel ...

Dive into a frosty exploration of survival with 'Frozen Bounty', transcending readers beyond the realms of everyday living and into a world clad in ice. Seamlessly blending history, science, and survival, 'Frozen Bounty' unveils the profound skillfulness and adaptability required to subsist in the relentless Ice Age. Structured with precision, the gripping chapters draw you into the ancient era; journey through the intricacies of foraging, ice-navigating, seasonal understanding, and plant identification. Uncover the vital role of edible flora and the danger lurking within poisonous plants, ...

"Unveiling Shadows of Injustice" is a gripping exploration of the true story behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This book delves into the declassified documents and eyewitness testimonies that shed light on the events leading up to the assassination, the plot itself, and the aftermath. It uncovers the key players involved, their motives, and the involvement of government agencies. The book also examines the accountability and trials that followed, the impact on the civil rights movement, and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. It delves into the conspiracy theories ...

In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada in their relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons, policing and borders, as well as through purported care institutions such as hospitals and social work.

Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s”. Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity.

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.

It's time to offer yourself the same care, kindness, and love that you generously extend to others. "The Ultimate Self-Love Guide for Black Women” is an essential toolkit for incorporating self-care into your busy life, understanding the importance of self-compassion, and transforming self-love from a concept into a daily practice.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling.

With A Hard Rain, Gaillard gives us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller's eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times: civil rights, black power, women's liberation, the war in Vietnam, and the protests and movements against it.

For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s essays, and speeches over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation.

Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim-displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S., as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.