African Cities

Ten-year-old Jada Sly is an artist and a spy-in-training. When she isn't studying the art from her idols like Jackie Ormes, the first-known African American cartoonist, she's chronicling her spy training and other observations in her art journal. Back home in New York City, after living in France for five years, Jada is ready to embark on her first and greatest spy adventure yet. She plans to scour New York City in search of her missing mother, even though everyone thinks her mom died in a plane crash. Except Jada, who is certain her mom was a spy, too.

On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships.

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith’s magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle.

Rhea's neighborhood is fading away—the mom-and-pop shops of her childhood forced out to make space for an artisanal kombucha brewery here, a hot yoga studio there. And everywhere, the feeling that this place is no longer meant for her. Because while their little corner of South L.A. isn't perfect, to Rhea and her two best friends, it's something even more important—it's home. And it's worth protecting. But as more white people flock to their latest edgy, urban paradise, more of Rhea's friends and family are pushed out. Until Rhea decides it's time to push back.

Kai Lewis is a TV reporter with the inside scoop on Detroit's juiciest corruption scandals. Years ago, her affair with Frank Anderson, the very handsome but very married lead news anchor, had taken her body, soul, and career to new heights. But Kai's thrill ride with Frank ended in an unspeakable tragedy. Now, she avoids his advances, despite the deep feelings she still has for him.

Amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear amongst its most dangerous denizens. But the ghosts from her past are always by her side - and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she loves most. Can one woman ever sacrifice enough to save an entire community? Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel - a magical love story, a compelling chronicle of interracial tension, and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

After being released from a five-year prison sentence for an armed robbery gone sideways, Tarzan Brixton makes a vow to his dying mother to change his ways. With his mother’s medical bills piling up, the temptation of the criminal life becomes too real once again. His solution is to escape the rough streets of New York for the equally ruthless beaches of Kingston, Jamaica. He soon creates a drug-running empire while falling in love with a beautiful Jamaican woman named Maya.

It's 1969 when 15-year-old Huey Fairchild begins high school at Claremont Prep, one of New York City's most prestigious boys' schools. His mother had uprooted her family from their small hometown of Akersburg, Georgia, a few years earlier, leaving behind Huey's white father and the racial unrest that ran deeper than the Chattahoochee River. But for our sharp-tongued protagonist, forgetting the past is easier said than done. At Claremont, where the only other nonwhite person is the janitor, Huey quickly realizes that racism can lurk beneath even the nicest school uniform. After a momentary slip of his temper, Huey finds himself facing legal charges.

A small university in Miami, Florida, is facing a rapid decline of incoming students. The social, athletic, and financial status of the school is dying. Dr. Hyatt, the school’s president, has his back against the wall. He sends his recruiter, Phillip Brown, to recruit a team of guys who have been banned from other schools to rob rival universities in Florida. Their objective is to revitalize his program and bring the other schools down.

Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on.

Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive. He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates - the highly rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

Editor and investigative reporter Jefferson Morley has been widely published in national periodicals and is the author of the critically acclaimed nonfiction work Our Man in Mexico. An eye-opening look at Washington’s first race riot, Snow-Storm in August also offers revealing profiles of Arthur Bowen, the slave blamed for the riot, and “Star Spangled Banner” lyricist Francis Scott Key, a defender of slavery who sought capital punishment for Bowen.

White Americans have long been comfortable in the assumption that they are the cultural norm. Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation’s diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a Black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the most inspiring civil rights leader in American history. He was a scholar and a very gifted orator, but, before all else, he was a pastor, a theologian, a martyr, a Christian. Spirit-Led Prophet uniquely tells his compelling story from the perspective of his faith. In the midst of a tumultous public life, King prayed for guidance and depended upon God’s spirit to lead him.

Chris Grainger is a man on a mission. He has allowed his lady, Angel, to take care of the both of them long enough and drastically decides to make a change. When he uses money from their joint savings to finance his dream, unexpected trials stop his progress. His chance meetings with an old-school ex-bartender, a brainiac computer whiz kid, and a tough young punk could offer Chris much-needed help or unforeseen harm. With limited options, Chris is forced to take risks that could make or break his future.

Black voters have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party for the last fifty years - and for their loyalty, black Americans have been rewarded with worsening schools, collapsed families, skyrocketed incarceration rates, disappearing jobs, and rising crime. Crystal Wright, editor of the blog Conservative Black Chick, exposes how the Democratic Party has systematically betrayed black voters.

If you really want to understand Jim Crow - what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it - you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

Against the backdrop of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent American history, as riots and demonstrations spread across the nation, the Tigers of poor, segregated East High School in Columbus, Ohio, did something no team from one school had ever done before: They won the state basketball and baseball championships in the same year. They defeated bigger, richer, whiter teams across the state and along the way brought blacks and whites together, eased a painful racial divide throughout the state, and overcame extraordinary obstacles on their road to success.

The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. An enduring white supremacist myth claims brutal conditions in Black communities are mainly the result of Black people's collective choices and moral failings. But there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can't solve. Noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes listeners on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued.