Great African American

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.

In this fascinating tale set in 1919, the Thomas family leaves New Orleans for Chicago as part of the Great Migration, seeking equality denied in the South. They are confident and optimistic. But hope is extinguished when they are met by 6,000 National Guard troops deployed to quell an earlier race riot. Linda and Ben prepare their nephew Trey to lead the family through the treacherous landscape of a big city plagued by segregation, police violence, and corruption. Is he ready? They devise a risky plan to challenge real estate covenants banning Blacks from buying homes in white ...

Originally published in 1938, Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of novellas, was the first book from Richard Wright, who would go on to win international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the Black experience. Set in the American Deep South, each of the powerful and devastating stories in Uncle Tom's Children concerns an aspect of the lives of Black people in the post-slavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. The collection also includes a personal essay by Wright titled "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.

Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by society and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters to God. The letters, spanning 20 years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women.

Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. And it is also Cassie's story - Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to the Logan family, even as she learns to draw strength from her own sense of dignity and self-respect.

Buck O'Neil once described him as "Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one". Among experts, he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime, he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America's most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.

In 1945, Charlie Trammell steps off a cross-country train into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles. Lured by his cousin Marguerite’s invitation to the esteemed West Adams Heights, Charlie is immediately captivated by the Black opulence of L.A.’s newly rechristened “Sugar Hill.” Settling in at a local actress’s energetic boarding house, Charlie discovers a different way of life—one brimming with opportunity—from a promising career at a Black-owned insurance firm, the absence of Jim Crow, to the potential of an unforgettable romance. But nothing dazzles quite like James “Reaper” Mann.

In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the innocents,” but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.

An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not. It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend.

Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns.

An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known, the Mississippi flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of nearly one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of blacks north, and transformed American society and politics forever.

A biography telling the life story of Booker T. Washington, along with his accomplishments toward promoting the education of African Americans.

Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live. Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization.

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.

John H. Johnson, the remarkable entrepreneur who founded the Ebony publishing empire, tells the story of his success. The wealthiest African-American in the US today, Johnson shares his rags to riches saga, from the many obstacles that confronted him to his ultimate triumph.

Over the course of six decades, an unprecedented wave of black Americans left the South and spread across the nation in search of a better life - a migration that sparked stunning demographic and cultural changes in 20th-century America. Through gripping and accessible historical narrative, author and activist Blair Imani examines the largely overlooked impact of the Great Migration and how it affected - and continues to affect - black identity and America as a whole.

Welcome to the Northwestern Hemisphere, 2529. An equally exciting and terrifying world born from the ashes of our own, where almost half of people are born invisible, and thus relegated to second-class citizenship. Sweetmint, a young invisible woman, has done everything right her entire life, from excelling in school to landing a highly sought-after apprenticeship with a mysterious, powerful inventor.

A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man’s life in this “coming of age story that captures the soul of America” (The Washington Post), the debut novel from The New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Vinson Cunningham.