This poignant play, written by current and formerly incarcerated authors, uses gripping truths and soulful dialogue to reveal the human cost of America's for-profit justice system. The story follows Omar, pulled back into the prison system after trying...

Discover the astonishing, inspirational, and largely unknown true story of the eighteen African American athletes who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, defying the racism of both Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South.Set against the turbulent...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeIn Up from Slavery, Washington recounts the story of his life—from slave to educator. The early sections deal with his upbringing as a slave and his efforts to get an...

The village of Glencoe has a proud history of early African American settlement. In recent years, however, this once thriving African American community has begun to disperse. Robert Sideman, a thirty-year Glencoe resident, relates this North Shore...

All-Black institutions and local community groups have been at the forefront of the freedom struggle since the beginning.Lifting the Chains is a history of the Black experience in America since the Civil War, told by one of our mostdistinguished...

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Many of today’s insurgent Black movements call for an end to racial capitalism. They take aim at policing and mass incarceration, the racial...

In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number...

Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 1059-1133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text...

A collection of first-person accounts documenting a historical legacy of violence against black women in the U.S.In Wounds of the Spirit, Traci West employs first person accounts-from slave narratives to contemporary interviews to Tina Turner's...

2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies   In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance...

The more citizens trust their government, the better democracy functions. However, African Americans have long suffered from the lack of equal protection by their government, and the racial discrimination they have faced breaks down their trust in...

A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history, feminism, and activism, who helped pave the way for modern social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her NameWinner of the American...

A new edition of a celebrated contemporary work on race and racismPraised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft “ought to be positioned,” as Bookforum put it, “at the center of any discussion of race in American life...

Foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience“How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. For many thinkers across the color line, the “Negro problem” was inextricably linked...

The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about...

Winner of the 2017 Race, Gender, and Class Section Book Award from the American Sociological AssociationPopular discussions of professional women often dwell on the conflicts faced by the woman who attempts to “have it all,” raising children while...

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history,...

Ending the horrors of police violence requires addressing economic inequalityIn the wake of the mass protests following the police murder of George Floyd nearly every major consumer brand had proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad...

2022 Whiting Award Winner for NonfictionFinalist • National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism)Best Books of the Year: TIME, Kirkus Reviews"This is a very smart and soulful book. Jesse McCarthy is a terrific essayist." ―Zadie SmithA supremely talented...

Blending personal memoir with historical accounts, this searing history of the Jim Crow South captures the realities of those who experienced it—and shines a light on its enduring legacy. The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow...