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....

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....

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....

Already a major international bestseller, Zeinab Badawi’s sweeping and much-needed survey of African history traces the continent’s extraordinary legacy from prehistory to the present from the African perspective.

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....

In 1852, Frederick Douglass, former slave and, by then, a leading figure in the abolitionist movement was asked by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Association to address the group for their July 4th celebration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York....

Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

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

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans....

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 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....

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

Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders....

Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously....

A self-care guidebook full of activities for Black men everywhere pursuing joy, creating connections, confronting racism, and working through intergenerational trauma: This is your guide to wellness and self-discovery.

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world....

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

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

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.

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 National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

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.

First time on audio! The timeless Pulitzer Prize winner, the first in an epic two-volume biography that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era, narrated by Emmy and Tony Award winner Courtney B. Vance.

How Virgil Abloh’s iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry embodied a groundbreaking transformation of the relationship between who we are and what we wear.

A groundbreaking look at how Black visionaries—from Wall Street to Lagos and beyond—are reimagining capitalism to benefit the needs of Black people and, ultimately, everyone.

This monumental biography by David Levering Lewis—eight years in the research and writing—treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how W.E.B. Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator.

Make It Ours is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury. With access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from visionary Black designers like Ozwald Boateng to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan weaves a spellbinding tale of a young man’s rise amid a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker and the author’s great-grandmother and namesake, is a fascinating figure whose legendary parties and Dark Tower salon helped define the Harlem Renaissance. After inheriting her mother’s hair care enterprise, A’Lelia would become America’s first high profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts.

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms.

In the 1970s, entire blocks of the South Bronx burned while the rest of New York City looked the other way. City of Fires is the unflinching, deeply researched true story of how deliberate neglect, institutional betrayal, and a brutal calculus of profit over people turned working-class neighborhoods into charred war zones. This isn’t a story of natural decay or “urban blight.” It’s a history of arson-for-profit schemes, city-sanctioned abandonment, and a government that turned a blind eye—sometimes on purpose. Told through the voice of a lifelong New Yorker who lived through the ...

The Black community is currently at a crossroad of incredible challenges and untapped potential. This book reaches back to honor the legacies of great Black leaders who led intentionally by service and persevered on purpose. From freedom fighters to business pioneers, these powerful stories offer timeless lessons and practical methods of application for today’s leaders. This book is a call to return, not to the past, but to the past principles that made progress possible. It is a reminder that servant leadership is not weakness, but a force we possess to restore, rebuild, and reclaim the ...

Smith tells the joyful story of the musicians, the radio DJs, the record labels, and the live venues where jazz not only survived but thrived in the 1960s. In an era marked by turmoil and struggle, popular jazz offered a powerful outlet for joy, resilience, pride, and triumph.

Uncover the Hidden Threads Connecting Two of Black America's Most Enigmatic Organizations. At first glance, the discreet, centuries-old traditions of Black Freemasonry seem worlds apart from the fiery, revolutionary spirit of the Nation of Islam. One, a quiet fraternal order rooted in Enlightenment ideals and community building; the other, a powerful religious and political movement born from the crucible of urban despair and radical Black nationalism. But what if these seemingly disparate forces shared more than meets the eye? In Beyond the Lodge, Within the Nation, delve into a compelling...