African Studies

With her holistic approach to filling your life with comfort, balance, and peace, Debrena Jackson Gandy debunks society's myth that doing something for yourself is decadent and selfish. In fact, she says, the joy we gain from treating ourselves--whether to a luxuriant bath or to a meditative hour alone--is transferred to the people in our lives. When we emerge rejuvenated, others benefit from a patient mother, a fulfilled wife, an effective coworker, a solidly grounded friend.

Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In this audiobook, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight white supremacy. It's a must-listen for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.

Renowned as a diversity and inclusion strategist, Michelle Gadsden-Williams held C-Suite positions at major organizations for many years and then took the off-ramp to probe a different career path, launching Ceiling Breakers LLC, with the primary goal to help women and professionals of color reach their full potential. As a woman of color and corporate executive who has worked and traveled the world for several Fortune 500 companies - all while managing a chronic illness - she provides insight into overcoming the barriers facing professionals in today's workplace.

Few television shows revolutionized comedy as profoundly or have had such an enormous and continued impact on our culture as In Living Color. Inspired by Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, and Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans created a television series unlike any that had come before it. In Living Color shaped American culture in ways both seen and unseen. Now, Homey Don't Play That! reveals the complete, captivating story of how In Living Color overcame enormous odds to become a major, zeitgeist-seizing hit.

Can’t Nothing Bring Me Down is the memoir of 104-year-old world-record-holding runner Ida Keeling. Miss Ida, as she’s known throughout her Bronx community, isn’t your typical runner. Her fierce independence helped her through the Depression and the civil rights movement. But her greatest trials were yet to come.

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

A woman wrestles with stifling race and gender expectations in this debut novel by Nella Larsen, one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance.

Publicado originalmente em 1983, Tornar-se negro foi pioneiro ao conectar a psicanálise com a questão racial. De forma inovadora e potente, a psiquiatra e psicanalista Neusa Santos Souza dedicou um estudo acadêmico à vida emocional de negros e negras, justificado pela absoluta ausência de um discurso nesse nível elaborado pelo negro acerca de si mesmo. Partindo da própria experiência de ser negra numa sociedade de hegemonia branca, Neusa analisa uma série de depoimentos dados a ela, assinalando neles as consequências brutais do racismo.

In his final speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop," Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his support of African American garbage workers on strike in Memphis. Although some consider this oration King's finest, it is mainly known for its concluding two minutes, wherein King compares himself to Moses and seems to predict his own assassination. But King gave an hour-long speech, and the concluding segment can only be understood in relation to the whole.

On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city's streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders' criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can't Wait.

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of "fugitive pedagogy"—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools.

The word cowboy conjures up vivid images of rugged men on saddled horses - men lassoing cattle, riding bulls, or brandishing guns in a shoot-out. White men, as Hollywood remembers them. What is woefully missing from these scenes is their counterparts: the Black cowboys who made up one-fourth of the wranglers and rodeo riders. This book tells their story.

Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, and Five-Carat Soul, Kill ’Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown embodied the contradictions of American life: He was an unsettling symbol of the tensions between North and South, Black and White, rich and poor. After receiving a tip that promises to uncover the man behind the myth, James McBride goes in search of the “real” James Brown.

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.

In her first book, The Presidency in Black and White, journalist April Ryan examined race in America through her experience as a White House reporter. In this book, she shifts the conversation from the White House to every home in America. At Mama's Knee looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children.

On June 17, 2015, 12 members of the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina welcomed a young white man to their evening Bible study. He arrived with a pistol, 88 bullets, and hopes of starting a race war. Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine innocents during their closing prayer horrified the nation. In Grace Will Lead Us Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes provides a definitive account of the tragedy’s aftermath.

Stephen L. Carter delves into his past and retrieves the inspiring story of his grandmother’s life. She was Black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s - and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected 20 lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.