Black & African American

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....

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....

The award-winning art historian and founder of the Vision & Justice project uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.

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....

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....

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....

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....

From the governor of Maryland, the true story of two kids with the same name: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison.

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....

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history.

Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war.

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

During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting....

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....

The black experience in America - starting from its origins in western Africa up to 1961 - is examined in this seminal study from a prominent African American figure....

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum....

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....

The classic, New York Times best-selling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America. Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups....

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.

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....

In this honest and welcoming book, diversity and inclusion expert, professor, and award-winning speaker Dr. Omekongo Dibinga argues that we must embark on a massive undertaking to re-educate ourselves on the stereotypes that have proven harmful, and too often deadly, to the black community....

An unapologetic look into the factors that have caused so many Blacks to think and act in the negative way they do towards themselves and others....

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.

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

An unapologetic exploration of the Black mental health crisis - and a comprehensive road map to getting the care you deserve in an unequal system....

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation.

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

In 1993, Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her. As Tobin sat in rapt attention, Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad.

At a time when almost a third of US States have restricted or limited the teaching of Black History and African American Studies, this book provides a crucial guide for parents and educators alike. A sustainable curiosity and enthusiasm for lifelong learning can be easily inspired through simple, practical exercises which connect math and science to real-world issues your children confront in their everyday lives. By integrating these lessons with interdisciplinary learning from fictional literature, non-fictional biographies, even movies and games, children are guided toward a deeper ...

Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn’t have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are. In this immersive audiobook adaptation—with wall-to-wall sound design, an expansive music soundtrack, and full-cast narration including the author and his son—Bell uses his sharp humor to examine how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood.

Talking About Microaggressions is a powerful resource for parents and educators to guide others in understanding and responding to unintentionally hurtful words, phrases and actions. Through insightful examples and thought-provoking critical questions, real-life scenarios are explored to develop easy to implement practical advice on how to interrupt, question, and engage constructively against microaggressions. This book empowers readers to take action against microaggressions in their daily lives with step by step suggestions for supporting victims and denormalizing harmful behaviors. By ...

This groundbreaking book introduces a new branch of theological thought Adams calls womanish, as a play on the womanist tradition (the theology of Black womanhood). "Womanish," remembers Adams, is a term Black mothers used for young girls as they grew more interested in doing grown-up things. Adams draws on her own life story as well as the life stories of other Black girls to explore theological concepts such as Scripture, theodicy, salvation, prayer, neighborly love, and the image of God.

Inspired by Malcolm X, Russell Shoatz became a lifelong crusader for justice, a soldier in the most militant units of the Black Liberation Army. Shoatz was convicted to life in prison following a coordinated attack on a park police station that left one guard dead.The prison walls, however, could not deter Shoatz’s battle for personal and collective freedom. He escaped state prisons twice, making him a living legend, and endowed him with the moniker “Maroon,” once used to honor runaway slaves from plantations.

In Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement, author Raymond Summerville explores how proverbs and proverbial language played a significant role in the long civil rights era. Proverbs have been used throughout history to share and disseminate brief, powerful statements of truth and philosophical insight.

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.