The 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an African-American teenager in Florida, and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, brought public attention to controversial "Stand Your Ground" laws. The verdict, as much as the killing, sent shock waves through the...

Nearly a week after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama walked into the press briefing room and shocked observers by saying that “Trayvon could have been me.” He talked personally and poignantly about his...

The fascinating story of a friendship, a lost tradition, and an incredible discovery, revealing how enslaved men and women made encoded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad.  In Hidden in Plain View, historian...

When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Regrettably, the reality hasn’t lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans’ political beliefs have become significantly more...

Virgin Islands-born, Harlem-based, Hubert H. Harrison's "When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World" is a collection of over fifty articles that detail his pioneering theoretical,...

For twenty-five years, Debby Irving sensed inexplicable racial tensions in her personal and professional relationships. As a colleague and neighbor, she worried about offending people she dearly wanted to befriend. As an arts administrator, she didn't...

Illuminates the threats Black women face and the lack of substantive public policy towards gendered violenceBlack women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling...

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., electrified the nation when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In The Dream, Drew D. Hansen explores the fascinating and little-known history of King's legendary...

Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on more than seven hundred interviews with all of King's surviving...

Acclaimed visionary and intellectual bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the bestselling All About Love: New Visions. Here she continues her love song to the nation in the groundbreaking and soul-stirring...

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally...

An indispensable contribution to the movement for racial justice in “postracial” America.

*Now a major motion picture—Rob Peace—starring Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, and Chiwetel Ejiofor**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and more* The New York Times bestselling account of a young...

With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current...

A revealing collection that restores Dr. King as being every bit as radical as Malcolm X“The radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies. . . . The response of...

From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its...

A New York Times Notable Book | Lambda Literary Award Winner | Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award“Charles Blow is the James Baldwin of our age.” — Washington Blade“[An] exquisite memoir . . . Delicately wrought and arresting.” — New York...

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally...

“With this history of the civil rights movement focusing on Everyman-turned-hero, the commoner as crusader for justice, Payne challenges the old idea that history is the biography of great men.”—Kirkus Reviews “Remarkably astute in its judgments and...

One of the most important figures of the American civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin taught Martin Luther King Jr. the methods of Gandhi, spearheaded the 1963 March on Washington, and helped bring the struggle of African Americans to the forefront of a...