The Black church is often praised for its contribution to Black culture and politics. More recently Islam has been recognized as an important force in African American liberation. Anthony Pinn's new anthology By These Hands demonstrates the crucial,...

Sojourner Truth first gained prominence at an 1851 Akron, Ohio, women's rights conference, saying, "Dat man over dar say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches. . . . Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles ...

This compelling look at the wellsprings of cultural vitality during one of the most dehumanizing experiences in history provides a fresh perspective on the African-American past.

The most famous collection of Garvey's speeches and essays, in a special Centennial Edition. The Garveyites' Bible!

With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg has written the most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power movement - and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and the larger...

This is a cross-disciplinary meditation on how all human beings may be linked through a primordial African collective unconsious. The author uses a non-Western intellectual paradigm and draws his documentation from many fields including biology, physics,...

Almost fifty years ago Melville Herskovits set out to debunk the myth that black Americans have no cultural past. Originally published in 1941, his unprecedented study of black history and culture recovered a rich African heritage in religious and...

'.....Through an exhaustive investigation of black songs, folk tales, proverbs, aphorisms, verbal games and the long narrative oral poems known as 'toasts, ' Levine argues that the value system of Afro-Americans can only be understood through an analysis...

The history of the black struggle for civil rights and political and economic equality in America is deeply tied to the strategies, agendas, and styles of black leaders. In this compelling work, Manning Marable examines different models of black...

A dazzling and comprehensive overview of the African American literary tradition. This landmark anthology includes the work of 120 writers over two centuries, from the earliest known literary work by an African American, Lucy Terry's poem "Bars Fight,"...

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller! “It's the best memoir I've ever read.” —Oprah Winfrey“Will Smith isn't holding back in his bravely inspiring new memoir . . . An ultimately heartwarming read, Will provides a humane glimpse of the man behind the...

Allan Spear explores here the history of a major Negro community during a crucial thirty-year period when a relatively fluid patter of race relations gave way to a rigid system of segregation and discrimination. This is the first historical study of the...

A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.As the blackface minstrel show evolved from its beginnings in the American Revolution to its peak during the late 1800s, its frenetic dances, low-brow...

This book examines a remarkable political phenomenon--the dramatic shift of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party in the 1930s, a shift all the more striking in light of the Democrats' indifference to racial concerns. Nancy J. Weiss...