Describes the experiences of former slaves in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee during the Reconstruction years in an effort to understand the reasons for the mass migration of freedpeople to Kansas in 1879.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Power movement provided the dominant ideological framework through which many young, poor, and middle-class blacks made sense of their lives and articulated a political vision for their futures. The legacy...

This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering.Set in Memphis, home of...

Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought revisits the activism and arguments in support of separate black statehood from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, detailing the ways black nationalism historically mirrors broader currents in US...

Throughout African-American history, religion has been indelibly intertwined with the fight against intolerance and racial prejudice. Martin Luther King, Jr.-America's best-known champion of civil liberties-was a Baptist minister. Father Divine, a fiery...

Critical writings by the "father of Harlem radicalism".The brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist Hubert Harrison (1883 - 1927) is one of the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early twentieth-century America. Known as "the...

Both an unflinching indictment of past wrongs and an impassioned call to America to educate its citizens about the history of Africa and its people, The Debt says in no uncertain terms what white America owes blacks—and what blacks owe themselves.In this...

One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in AmericaA haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published...

"A superb oral history." —The Washington Post Book World"So touching, so exhilarating...no book for a long time has left me so moved or so happy." —The New York Times Book ReviewThe almost unfathomable courage and the undying faith that propelled the...

No other story in the Bible has fired the imaginations of African Americans quite like that of Exodus. Its tale of suffering and the journey to redemption offered hope and a sense of possibility to people facing seemingly insurmountable evil. Exodus!...

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few...

Now a TV series on FOX starring Morris Chestnut, Yaya DaCosta, Nadine Ellis, and Joe Morton."Fascinating. . . . [Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and the larger American picture." —New York TimesDebutante cotillions...

The classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience. With a preface by Ishmael Reed • “As with Malcolm X, Cleaver’s book is a spiritual autobiography. An odyssey...

In the first essay, Patterson analyzes the very latest survey data to delineate the different attitudes, behaviors, and circumstances of Afro-American men and women, dissecting both the external and internal causes for the great disparities he finds.In...

A remarkable true story of heroism, courage, and faith

From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and...

Delaney's hero is a West Indian slave who travels throughout the South advocating revolution, and later becomes the general of a black insurrectory fore in Cuba. Blake hopes that, with rebellion in Cuba and the expulsion of all Americans, Cuba's model as...

"The power of George Jackson's personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the...

First published in 1979, this is the classic sourcebook for the emergence of Black Thelogy in the United States. Born out of the Civil Rights Movement and the emerging demand for Black Power, Black Theology has tried for 25 years to relate the gospel to...

Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up in the South. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female...