In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African...

"A rare and courageous voice speaking from a place we fear to know: Mumia Abu-Jamal must be heard." —Alice Walker"Resonates with the moral force of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail." –Boston GlobeAfter twenty years on death row,...

With a new introduction, the groundbreaking classic Race Matters affirms its position as the bestselling, most influential, and most original articulation of the urgent issues in America's ongoing racial debate.Cornel West is at the forefront of thinking...

A searing history of life under Jim Crow that recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States—and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning...

The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement—a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person’s ability to affect change. “Anne Moody’s autobiography is an eloquent,...

Anna Deveare Smith's award-winning one-woman shows were borne of her uniquely brilliant ability to listen. In Talk to Me she applies her rare talent to the language of political power in America.Believing that character and language are inextricably...

Compelling work traces the formidable journey of an Igbo prince from captivity to freedom and literacy and recounts his enslavement in the New World, service in the Seven Years War with General Wolfe in Canada, voyages to the Arctic with the Phipps...

In writing his Self-Portrait of Black America, anthropologist, folklorist, and humanist John Gwaltney went in search of "Core Black People"―the ordinary men and women who make up black America―and asked them to define their culture. Their responses,...

With knowledge, spirit, good humor, and passion, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. brings to life a remarkable man whose thoughts and actions speak to our most burning contemporary issues and still inspire the desires, hopes, and dreams of us...

What is Critical Race Theory and why is it under fire from the political right? This foundational essay collection, which defines key terms and includes case studies, is the essential work to understand the intellectual movement Why did the president of...

This essential collection comprises a trio of the most influential African-American writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring such themes as slavery and its abolition, the struggle for equality, and the impassioned rise from bondage...

Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five post-Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered...

This groundbreaking historical expose unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in “The Age...

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo—a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century—uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban...

In this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation’s rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and...

In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

From the New York Times-bestselling authors of THE PACTDrs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt discovered early in their friendship that they shared a disturbing trait: as children, they navigated dangerous inner-city life without a father’s...

"Masterly."--Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth...

The searing, visionary memoir of founding Black Panther Huey P. Newton, in a dazzling graphic package Tracing the birth of a revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous and oft-quoted autobiography is as much a manifesto as a portrait of the inner circle of...

The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois from renowned scholar David Levering Lewis, now in one condensed and updated volumeWilliam Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a...