104 Books Published by Beacon Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Watershed (2024) by Percival Everett Watershed (2024)

by Percival Everett
Beacon Press (Mar 05, 2024)
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A rediscovered classic of politics, murder, espionage, for the first time in paperback

On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets.

Introduced by Sherman Alexie, who has taken a film option on the novel, this important novel is published in paperback for the first time.


Click for more detail about God’s Country (2024) by Percival Everett God’s Country (2024)

by Percival Everett
Beacon Press (Mar 05, 2024)
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The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. It’s 1871, and he’s lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.


Click for more detail about Butter: Novellas, Stories, and Fragments by Gayl Jones Butter: Novellas, Stories, and Fragments

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Apr 04, 2023)
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A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares.

”Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable … and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched.”
—Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine and Breathe

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.

Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico, and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas; about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film, and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.


Click for more detail about Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century by Jasmine Brown Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century

by Jasmine Brown
Beacon Press (Jan 24, 2023)
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Black women physicians’ stories have gone untold for far too long, leaving gaping holes in American medical history, in women’s history, and in black history. It’s time to set the record straight

No real account of black women physicians in the US exists, and what little mention is made of these women in existing histories is often insubstantial or altogether incorrect. In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a rich new perspective, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school. Brown champions these black women physicians, including the stories of:

· Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who graduated from medical school only fourteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and provided medical care for the newly freed slaves who had been neglected and exploited by the medical system.

· Dr. Edith Irby Jones, the first African American to attend a previously white-only medical school in the Jim Crow South, where she was not allowed to eat lunch with her classmates or use the women’s bathroom. Still, Dr. Irby Jones persisted and graduated from medical school, going on to directly inspire other black women to pursue medicine such as …

· Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who, after meeting Dr. Irby Jones, changed her career ambitions from becoming a Dillard’s salesclerk to becoming a doctor. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Elders as the US surgeon general, making her the first African American and second woman to hold this position.

Brown tells the stories of these doctors from the perspective of a black woman in medicine. Her journey as a medical student already has parallels to those of black women who entered medicine generations before her. What she uncovers about these women’s struggles, their need to work twice as hard and be twice as good, and their ultimate success serves as instruction and inspiration for new generations considering a career in medicine or science.


Click for more detail about The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones The Birdcatcher

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Sep 13, 2022)
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Publishers Weekly Top 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2022

“Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature.”
—Imani Perry


Legendary writer Gayl Jones returns with a stunning new novel about Black American artists in exile

Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is publishing again. In the wake of her long-awaited fifth novel, Palmares, The Birdcatcher is another singular achievement, a return to the circles of her National Book Award finalist, The Healing.

Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island.

A study in Black women’s creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature - rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up

by Remica Bingham-Risher
Beacon Press (Sep 06, 2022)
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Examines firsthand the lives of legendary Black writers who made a way out of no way to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps

Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith, to explore the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on the artistic process. Each essay is thematically inspired, centered on one of her interviews, and uses quotes drawn from her talks to showcase their philosophies. Each essay also delves into how her own life and work are influenced by these elders. Essays included are these:

· “blk/wooomen revolution”
· “Girls Loving Beyoncé and Their Names”
· “The Terror of Being Destroyed”
· “Standing in the Shadows of Love”
· “Revision as Labyrinth”

Noting the frustrating tendency for Black artists to be pigeonholed into the confines of various frameworks and ideologies—Black studies, women’s studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and so on—Bingham-Risher reveals the multitudes contained within Black poets, both past and present. By capturing the radical love ethic of Blackness amid incessant fear, she has amassed not only a wealth of knowledge about contemporary Black poetry and poetry movements but also brings to life the historical record of Black poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the early decades of the 21st.

Examining cultural traditions, myths, and music from the Four Tops to Beyoncé, Bingham-Risher reflects on the enduring gifts of art and community. If you’ve ever felt alone on your journey into the writing world, the words of these poets are for you.


Click for more detail about Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho by Gayl Jones Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Apr 05, 2022)
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From the highly acclaimed author of Corregidora and The Healing—two epic poems, the love songs of fugitive slaves, set in 17th-century Brazil; continuing the unforgettable journey told in Gayl Jones’s masterwork, Palmares (2021).

Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, offers two books in one with this volume of poetry. Jones renders the saga of Palmares, a foundational tale in the annals of colonial terrorism and Black resistance, in verse, told in the voices of the characters in her epic novel Palmares.

In the late 17th century, the fugitive slave enclave of Palmares was destroyed by Portuguese colonists. Amid the flight and re-enslavement of Palmares’s inhabitants emerges the love story of Almeyda and Anninho. In Song for Anninho, Almeyda moves between a dark present, in which she is once again enslaved and abused by a terrible captor, and memories of her lover, Anninho, whom she believes to have been killed. Song for Almeyda, released now for the first time, is told in the voices of Anninho and his fellow warriors.

Fans of Corregidora (one of the New Yorker’s “Best Books We Read in 2020” picks), which tracked the legacy of enslavement, and Palmares will especially appreciate these verses. Brimming with intimacy, history, and revolution, the poems collected serve as a declaration of decolonial love.


Click for more detail about Mosquito by Gayl Jones Mosquito

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Feb 15, 2022)
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Bury those easy-to-read Black romance books. Mosquito is where African-American literature is heading as we approach the twenty-first century. —E. Ethelbert Miller, Emerge

From the highly acclaimed author of Palmares, Corregidora, and The Healing—a rare and unforgettable journey set along the US-Mexico border about identity, immigration, and “the new underground railroad.”

First discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. In Mosquito, she examines the US-Mexico border crisis through the eyes of Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson, an African American truck driver known as Mosquito. Her journey begins after she discovers a stowaway who nearly gives birth in the back of her truck, sparking Mosquito’s accidental yet growing involvement in “the new underground railroad,” a sanctuary movement for Mexican immigrants.

As Mosquito’s understanding of the immigrants’ need to forge new lives and identities deepens, so too does Mosquito’s romance with Ray, a gentle revolutionary, a philosopher, and, perhaps, a priest. Along the road, Mosquito introduces us to Delgadina, a Chicana bartender who fries cactus, writes haunting stories, and studies to become a detective; Monkey Bread, a childhood pal who is, improbably, assistant to a blonde star in Hollywood; Maria, the stowaway who names her baby Journal, a misspelled tribute to her unwitting benefactor Sojourner; and many more.

”Gayl Jones is the black writer we all want to be when we grow up … Mosquito is Gayl Jones unbound, but certainly not untethered nor without her still prodigious storehouses of language, craft, and storytelling prowess.“—Greg Tate, Voice Literary Supplement


Click for more detail about Living While Black: Using Joy, Beauty, and Connection to Heal Racial Trauma by Guilaine Kinouani Living While Black: Using Joy, Beauty, and Connection to Heal Racial Trauma

by Guilaine Kinouani
Beacon Press (Jan 25, 2022)
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A Guardian “Best Book of 2021” Selection

A powerful look at the impacts of anti-Black racism and a practical guide for overcoming racial trauma through radical self-care as a form of resistance

Over the past 15 years, radical psychologist Guilaine Kinouani has focused her research, writing, and workshops on how racism affects both physical and mental health. Living While Black gives voice to the diverse, global experiences of Black people, using personal stories, powerful case studies, and eye-opening research to offer expert guidance on how to set boundaries and process micro-aggressions; protect children from racism; handle difficult race-based conversations; navigate the complexities of Black love; and identify and celebrate the wins.

Based on her findings, Kinouani has devised tried-and-tested strategies to help protect Black people from the harmful effects of verbal, physical, and structural racism. She empowers Black readers to adopt self-care mechanisms to improve their day-to-day wellness to help them thrive, not just survive, and to find hope and beauty—or even joy—in the face of racial adversity. She also provides a vital resource for allies seeking to better understand the impacts of racism and how they can help.

With the rise of far-right ideologies and the increase of racist hate crimes, Living While Black is both timely and instrumental in moving conversations from defining racism for non-Black majorities to focusing on healing and nurturing the mental health of those facing prejudice, discrimination, and the lasting effects of the violence of white supremacy.


Click for more detail about An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

by Kyle T. Mays
Beacon Press (Nov 16, 2021)
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The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian, Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy.

Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, “sacred” texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity.

“While we know that slavery and settler colonialism are intricately linked, Kyle Mays uniquely demonstrates that the afterlives of these two institutions are also linked. They provide the land, bodies, and capital for ‘newer’ systems of bondage to flourish, such as mass incarceration. You will never think of the peoples’ history the same way after reading An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination


Click for more detail about The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985 by James Baldwin The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985

by James Baldwin
Beacon Press (Sep 21, 2021)
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An essential compendium of James Baldwin’s most powerful nonfiction work, calling on us “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.”

Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did over the 4 decades in which he composed them. Longtime Baldwin fans and especially those just discovering his genius will appreciate this essential collection of his great nonfiction writing, available for the first time in affordable paperback. Along with 46 additional pieces, it includes the full text of dozens of famous essays from such books as:

  • Notes of a Native Son
  • Nobody Knows My Name
  • The Fire Next Time
  • No Name in the Street
  • The Devil Finds Work

This collection provides the perfect entre into Baldwin’s prescient commentary on race, sexuality, and identity in an unjust American society.


Click for more detail about White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality by Sheryll Cashin White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality

by Sheryll Cashin
Beacon Press (Sep 14, 2021)
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Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.

Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks.

Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.

“In this brilliant and nuanced new volume, Sheryll Cashin exposes the ways in which American policy decisions, from the early twentieth century to the present, have constructed a ‘residential caste system’ resulting in the entrapment of Black people in high-poverty neighborhoods while ‘overinvesting in affluent white space.’ Riveting and beautifully written, White Space, Black Hood convinces the reader of the centrality of geography in economic and social inequality.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“We need Sheryll Cashin’s scholarship to make sense of the racial inequalities that mar every urban community, and we need her vision to guide us to a more equal society. Illuminating, compassionate, and engrossing … an instant classic.”
—Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Sheryll Cashin is one of the most important civil rights scholars of our time, and White Space, Black Hood is her magnum opus, the searing culmination of decades of research about the devastating consequences of segregation. Cashin builds on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste to take down liberal and conservative orthodoxies on race. (White) America is not ready for this book.”
—Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men


Click for more detail about Palmares by Gayl Jones Palmares

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Sep 14, 2021)
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The epic rendering of a Black woman’s journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil; the return of a major voice in American literature.

First discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is ready to publish again. Palmares is the first of five new works by Gayl Jones to be published in the next two years, rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

Intricate and compelling, Palmares recounts the journey of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who comes of age on Portuguese plantations and escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares. Following its destruction, Almeyda embarks on a journey across colonial Brazil to find her husband, lost in battle.

Her story brings to life a world impacted by greed, conquest, and colonial desire. She encounters a mad lexicographer, desperate to avoid military service; a village that praises a god living in a nearby cave; and a medicine woman who offers great magic, at a greater price.

Combining the author’s mastery of language and voice with her unique brand of mythology and magical realism, Jones reimagines the historical novel. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter century, with vibrant settings and unforgettable characters, steeped in the rich oral tradition of its world. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, “[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.” Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon Press (Aug 24, 2021)
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Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States

Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.

She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.

While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm-shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.


Click for more detail about Nothing Personal by James Baldwin Nothing Personal

by James Baldwin
Beacon Press (May 04, 2021)
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James Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.

Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin’s deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020—which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with little resistance, openly toting flags of the Confederacy—Baldwin’s documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of where we find ourselves today.

Baldwin’s thoughts move through an interconnected range of questions, from America’s fixation on eternal youth, to its refusal to recognize the past, its addiction to consumerism, and the lovelessness that fuels it in its cities and popular culture. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increasing immediacy. This edition also includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry and an afterword from noted Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Both explore and situate the essay within the broader context of Baldwin’s work, the Movement for Black Lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Nothing Personal is both a eulogy and a declaration of will. In bringing this work into the twenty-first century, readers new and old will take away fundamental and recurring truths about life in the US. It is both a call to action, and an appeal to love and to life.


Click for more detail about Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement by Julian Bond Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

by Julian Bond
Beacon Press (Jan 12, 2021)
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A masterclass in the civil rights movement from one of the legendary activists who led it.

Horace Julian Bond was an influential social justice activist, politician, and visionary who is best known as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the civil rights movement.

Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today’s activists in the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Bond sought to dismantle the perception of the civil rights movement as a peaceful and respectable protest that quickly garnered widespread support. Through his lectures, Bond detailed the ground-shaking disruption the movement caused, its immense unpopularity at the time, and the bravery of activists, some very young, who chose to disturb order to pursue justice.

Beginning with the movement’s origins in the early twentieth century, Bond tackles key events such as the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine, Freedom Rides, sit-ins, Mississippi voter registration, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, Freedom Summer, and Selma. He explains the youth activism, community ties, and strategizing required to build strenuous and successful movements. With these firsthand accounts of the civil rights movement and original photos from Danny Lyon, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach makes history come alive.


Click for more detail about Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens by Desmond Meade Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens

by Desmond Meade
Beacon Press (Oct 06, 2020)
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The inspiring and eye-opening true story of one man’s undying belief in the power of a fully enfranchised nation.

"You may think the right to vote is a small matter, and if you do, I would bet you have never had it taken away from you." Thus begins the story of Desmond Meade and his inspiring journey to restore voting rights to roughly 1.4 million returning citizens in Florida—resulting in a stunning victory in 2018 that enfranchised the most people at once in any single initiative since women’s suffrage.

Let My People Vote is the deeply moving, personal story of Meade’s life, his political activism, and the movement he spearheaded to restore voting rights to returning citizens who had served their terms. Meade survived a tough childhood only to find himself with a felony conviction. Finding the strength to pull his life together, he graduated summa cum laude from college, graduated from law school, and married. But because of his conviction, he was not even allowed to sit for the bar exam in Florida. And when his wife ran for state office, he was filled with pride—but not permitted to vote for her.

Meade takes us on a journey from his time in homeless shelters, to the exhilarating, joyful night in November of 2018, when Amendment 4 passed with 65 percent of the vote. Meade’s story, and his commitment to a fully enfranchised nation, will prove to readers that one person really can make a difference.


Click for more detail about We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

by Bettina L. Love
Beacon Press (Feb 04, 2020)
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Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.

Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.


Click for more detail about A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross A Black Women’s History of the United States

by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
Beacon Press (Feb 04, 2020)
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Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and associate dean of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or co-editor of several previous books, including The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, winner of the 2017 SHEAR Book Award for Early American History. Connect with her at drdainarameyberry.com or @DainaRameyBerry on Twitter.

Kali Nicole Gross is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her previous books include Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America, winner of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction. Learn more at kalinicolegross.com or connect with her on Twitter @KaliGrossPhD.


Click for more detail about Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field by Howard Bryant Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field

by Howard Bryant
Beacon Press (Jan 21, 2020)
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A bold and impassioned meditation on injustice in our country that punctures the illusion of a postracial America and reveals it as a place where authoritarianism looms large.

Whether the issues are protest, labor, patriotism, or class division, it is clear that professional sports are no longer simply fun and games. Rather, the industry is a hotbed of fractures and inequities that reflect and even drive some of the most divisive issues in our country. The nine provocative and deeply personal essays in Full Dissidence confront the dangerous narratives that are shaping the current dialogue in sports and mainstream culture. The book is a reflection on a culture where African Americans continue to navigate the sharp edges of whiteness—as citizens who are always at risk of being told, often directly from the White House, to go back to where they came from. The topics Howard Bryant takes on include the player-owner relationship, the militarization of sports, the myth of integration, the erasure of black identity as a condition of success, and the kleptocracy that has forced America to ask itself if its beliefs of freedom and democracy are more than just words.

In a time when authoritarianism is creeping into our lives and is being embraced in our politics, Full Dissidence will make us question the strength of the bonds we think we have with our fellow citizens, and it shows us why we must break from the malignant behaviors that have become normalized in everyday life.


Click for more detail about White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

by Lauren Michele Jackson
Beacon Press (Nov 12, 2019)
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Exposes the new generation of whiteness thriving at the expense and borrowed ingenuity of black people—and explores how this intensifies racial inequality.

American culture loves blackness. From music and fashion to activism and language, black culture constantly achieves worldwide influence. Yet, when it comes to who is allowed to thrive from black hipness, the pioneers are usually left behind as black aesthetics are converted into mainstream success—and white profit.

Weaving together narrative, scholarship, and critique, Lauren Michele Jackson reveals why cultural appropriation—something that’s become embedded in our daily lives—deserves serious attention. It is a blueprint for taking wealth and power, and ultimately exacerbates the economic, political, and social inequity that persists in America. She unravels the racial contradictions lurking behind American culture as we know it—from shapeshifting celebrities and memes gone viral to brazen poets, loveable potheads, and faulty political leaders.

An audacious debut, White Negroes brilliantly summons a re-interrogation of Norman Mailer’s infamous 1957 essay of a similar name. It also introduces a bold new voice in Jackson. Piercing, curious, and bursting with pop cultural touchstones, White Negroes is a dispatch in awe of black creativity everywhere and an urgent call for our thoughtful consumption.


Click for more detail about Breathe: A Letter to My Sons by Imani Perry Breathe: A Letter to My Sons

by Imani Perry
Beacon Press (Sep 17, 2019)
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Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, and in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of her youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons, Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb and Issa Garner Rabb. Connect with her on Twitter (@imaniperry).


Click for more detail about Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A. Carruthers Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

by Charlene A. Carruthers
Beacon Press (Aug 27, 2019)
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A manifesto from one of America’s most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.


Click for more detail about An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon Press (Jul 23, 2019)
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2020 American Indian Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book

2020 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People,selected by National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Children’s Book Council


2019 Best-Of Lists: Best YA Nonfiction of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · Best Nonfiction of 2019 (School Library Journal) · Best Books for Teens (New York Public Library) · Best Informational Books for Older Readers (Chicago Public Library)
Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples’ resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism.

Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.

The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.


Click for more detail about Corregidora by Gayl Jones Corregidora

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Jan 29, 2019)
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Here is Gayl Jones’s classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.


Click for more detail about You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History by Howard Zinn You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History

by Howard Zinn
Beacon Press (Sep 18, 2018)
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If you’re both overcome and angered by the atrocities of our time, this will inspire a “new generation of activists and ordinary people who search for hope in the darkness” (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor).

Is change possible? Where will it come from? Can we actually make a difference? How do we remain hopeful?

Howard Zinn—activist, historian, and author of A People’s History of the United States—was a participant in and chronicler of some of the landmark struggles for racial and economic justice in US history. In his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn reflects on more than thirty years of fighting for social change, from his teenage years as a laborer in Brooklyn to teaching at Spelman College, where he emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice. A former bombardier in World War II, he later became an outspoken antiwar activist, spirited protestor, and champion of civil disobedience. Throughout his life, Zinn was unwavering in his belief that “small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” With a foreword from activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, this revised edition will inspire a new generation of readers to believe that change is possible.


Click for more detail about Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

by Imani Perry
Beacon Press (Sep 18, 2018)
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A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” and Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.

After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation’s first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry’s extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.


Click for more detail about White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin DiAngelo White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism

by Robin DiAngelo
Beacon Press (Jun 26, 2018)
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The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.

In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ’bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Download readers guides at www.beacon.org/whitefragility.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Michael Eric Dyson
Author’s Note
Introduction: We Can’t Get There from Here
1. The Challenges of Talking to White People About Racism
2. Racism and White Supremacy
3. Racism After the Civil Rights Movement
4. How Does Race Shape the Lives of White People?
5. The Good/Bad Binary
6. Anti-Blackness
7. Racial Triggers for White People
8. The Result: White Fragility
9. White Fragility in Action
10. White Fragility and the Rules of Engagement
11. White Women’s Tears
12. Where Do We Go from Here?
Resources for Continuing Education
Acknowledgments
Notes


Click for more detail about The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism by Howard Bryant The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism

by Howard Bryant
Beacon Press (May 08, 2018)
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Following in the footsteps of Robeson, Ali, Robinson and others, today’s Black athletes re-engage with social issues and the meaning of American patriotism

For most of the twentieth century, "No News on the Sports Page" governed how sports were played and perceived in America. The ballfield was a sanctuary from real-world problems. Today, that is a naive notion.

The reasons are complex. But among them, post 9/11, sports arenas transformed into staging grounds for American patriotism and pride. As America dealt with terrorism at home, hero-worship of law enforcement took center stage. Police officers threw out first pitches; soldiers’ surprise homecomings became a staple at half time; and teams wore camouflage jerseys to honor those who served. Any critique of police or military authority looked unpatriotic, even when the authority deserved criticism.

This paradigm shift activated a long-dormant force not seen in several decades: the black athlete as a figure of resistance. In The Heritage, sports journalist Howard Bryant observes how the tradition of neutrality on the pitch has given way to a new generation of activist-athletes. It is the story of the rise, fall, and return of "athlevists" who refuse to "shut up and play." It is a heritage built by the superstardom and radical politics of Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos in the 1960s; undermined by apolitical, corporation-friendly "transcenders of race" O.J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, in the following decades; and reclaimed today by the likes of LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and Carmelo Anthony in the wake of Ferguson and Freddie Gray. Revealing and incisive, Bryant deftly shows how sports is colliding with political culture, and how athletes, teams and leagues are melding the two.


Click for more detail about Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy by Sheryll Cashin Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

by Sheryll Cashin
Beacon Press (Feb 13, 2018)
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The landmark story of how interracial love and marriage changed American history—and continues to alter the landscape of American politics When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good. Not just a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, Loving challenges the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated. “White supremacy has long foiled love, and love has long foiled white supremacy. Sheryll Cashin offers us this essential historical revelation in Loving. This fascinating and accessible story puts the fifty-year-old Loving v. Virginia decision in much-needed historical perspective and shares its unknown post-history. In the end, Loving offers an optimistic showpiece of the possibilities of an antiracist America divorced from white supremacy where ‘dexterous’ acceptors of difference can marry, can befriend, can love the identical hearts under our different-looking skins. Loving gives us the historical tools and urges us to renew our old fight for the human right to love.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America “Cashin makes a compelling argument that interracial intimacy, though in and of itself inadequate for eradicating white supremacy, contributes to a racial dexterity the likes of which will be crucial to that task in years to come. With rich historicity and sharp analysis, she explores the ways in which interracial romance has long served as a bogeyman for racists but is now helping to create a critical mass of whites who may, finally, see fit to join with their black and brown partners, lovers, friends, and colleagues to forge a new and better nation.” —Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son and Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority


Click for more detail about Race Matters (hardcover) by Cornel West Race Matters (hardcover)

by Cornel West
Beacon Press (Dec 05, 2017)
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The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking classic, with a new introduction

First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West’s most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X. The insights Dr. West brings to these complex problems remain relevant, provocative, creative, and compassionate.

In a new introduction for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Dr. West argues that we are in the midst of a spiritual blackout characterized by imperial decline, racial animosity, and unchecked brutality and terror as seen in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlottesville. Calling for a moral and spiritual awakening, Dr. West finds hope in the collective and visionary resistance exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and the Black freedom tradition.

Now more than ever, Race Matters is an essential book for all Americans, helping us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.


Click for more detail about The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult by Jerald Walker The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult

by Jerald Walker
Beacon Press (Sep 12, 2017)
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A memoir of growing up with blind, African-American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world

When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames.

The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Jerry would be eleven years old.

Jerry’s parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world’s hardships. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height.

When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.


Click for more detail about Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks by Angela Jackson Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks

by Angela Jackson
Beacon Press (May 30, 2017)
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Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protege of Langston Hughes and mentor to a generation of poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Elizabeth Alexander.

Her poetry took inspiration from the complex portraits of black American life she observed growing up on Chicago’s Southside—a world of kitchenette apartments and vibrant streets. From the desk in her bedroom, as a child she filled countless notebooks with poetry, encouraged by the likes of Hughes and affirmed by Richard Wright, who called her work "raw and real."

Over the next sixty years, Brooks’s poetry served as a witness to the stark realities of urban life: the evils of lynching, the murders of Emmett Till and Malcolm X, the revolutionary effects of the civil rights movement, and the burgeoning power of the Black Arts Movement. Critical acclaim and the distinction in 1950 as the first black person ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize helped solidify Brooks as a unique and powerful voice.

Now, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, fellow Chicagoan and award-winning writer Angela Jackson delves deep into the rich fabric of Brooks’s work and world. Granted unprecedented access to Brooks’s family, personal papers, and writing community, Jackson traces the literary arc of this artist’s long career and gives context for the world in which Brooks wrote and published her work. It is a powerfully intimate look at a once-in-a-lifetime talent up close, using forty-three of Brooks’s most soul-stirring poems as a guide.

From trying to fit in at school ("Forgive and Forget"), to loving her physical self ("To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals"), to marriage and motherhood ("Maud Martha"), to young men on her block (""We Real Cool""), to breaking history ("Medgar Evers"), to newfound acceptance from her community and her elevation to a "surprising queenhood" ("The Wall"), Brooks lived life through her work.

Jackson deftly unpacks it all for both longtime admirers of Brooks and newcomers curious about her interior life. A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun is a commemoration of a writer who negotiated black womanhood and incomparable brilliance with a changing, restless world—an artistic maverick way ahead of her time.


Click for more detail about Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America by Stacey Patton Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America

by Stacey Patton
Beacon Press (Mar 07, 2017)
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Click for more detail about The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

by Daina Ramey Berry
Beacon Press (Jan 24, 2017)
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Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.


Click for more detail about Like One of The Family by Alice Childress Like One of The Family

by Alice Childress
Beacon Press (Jan 24, 2017)
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A new edition of Alice Childress’s classic novel about African American domestic workers, featuring a foreword by Roxane Gay

First published in Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, and composed of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge, Like One of the Family is a wry, incisive portrait of working women in Harlem in the 1950’s. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred’s outspoken accounts vividly capture her white employers’ complacency and condescension and their startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind and refuses to exchange dignity for pay.

Upon publication the book sparked a critique of working conditions, laying the groundwork for the contemporary domestic worker movement. Although she was critically praised, Childress’s uncompromising politics and unflinching depictions of racism, classism, and sexism relegated her to the fringe of American literature. Like One of the Family has been long overlooked, but this new edition, featuring a foreword by best-selling author Roxane Gay, will introduce Childress to a new generation.


Click for more detail about All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon Press (Oct 04, 2016)
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Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans

In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as:

“Columbus Discovered America”
“Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims”
“Indians Were Savage and Warlike”
“Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians”
“The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide”
“Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans”
“Most Indians Are on Government Welfare”
“Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich”
“Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol”

Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, “All the Real Indians Died Off” challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.


Click for more detail about Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families by Lori Tharps Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families

by Lori Tharps
Beacon Press (Oct 04, 2016)
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Weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis, Same Family, Different Colors explores the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States. Colorism and color bias the preference for or presumed superiority of people based on the lighter color of their skin is a pervasive but rarely openly discussed phenomenon, one that is centuries old and continues today. In Same Family, Different Colors journalist Lori Tharps, the mother of three mixed-race children with three distinct skin colors, uses her own family as a starting point to explore how skin-color difference is dealt with in African American, Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race families and communities. Along with intimate and revealing stories and anecdotes from dozens of diverse people from across the United States, Tharps adds a historical overview and a contemporary cultural critique. Same Family, Different Colors is a solution-seeking journey to the heart of identity politics, so this more subtle cousin to racism, in the author&rsqu;s words, will be acknowledged, understood, and debated.


Click for more detail about The Radical King (King Legacy) by Martin Luther King, Jr. The Radical King (King Legacy)

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Jan 12, 2016)
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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 the radical King to our catastrophic moment can be put in one word: revolution—a revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life, and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens… . Could it be that we know so little of the radical King because such courage defies our market-driven world?” —Cornel West, from the Introduction

Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was.

Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King’s revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism. As West writes, “Although much of America did not know the radical King—and too few know today—the FBI and US government did. They called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ … This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.”


From the Hardcover edition.


Click for more detail about The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America by Lani Guinier The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America

by Lani Guinier
Beacon Press (Jan 12, 2016)
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A fresh and bold argument for revamping our standards of "merit" and a clear blueprint for creating collaborative education models that strengthen our democracy rather than privileging individual elites.

Standing on the foundations of America’s promise of equal opportunity, our universities purport to serve as engines of social mobility and practitioners of democracy. But as acclaimed scholar and pioneering civil rights advocate Lani Guinier argues, the merit systems that dictate the admissions practices of these institutions are functioning to select and privilege elite individuals rather than create learning communities geared to advance democratic societies. Having studied and taught at schools such as Harvard University, Yale Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Guinier has spent years examining the experiences of ethnic minorities and of women at the nation’s top institutions of higher education, and here she lays bare the practices that impede the stated missions of these schools.

Goaded on by a contemporary culture that establishes value through ranking and sorting, universities assess applicants using the vocabulary of private, highly individualized merit. As a result of private merit standards and ever-increasing tuitions, our colleges and universities increasingly are failing in their mission to provide educational opportunity and to prepare students for productive and engaged citizenship.

To reclaim higher education as a cornerstone of democracy, Guinier argues that institutions of higher learning must focus on admitting and educating a class of students who will be critical thinkers, active citizens, and publicly spirited leaders. Guinier presents a plan for considering "democratic merit," a system that measures the success of higher education not by the personal qualities of the students who enter but by the work and service performed by the graduates who leave.

Guinier goes on to offer vivid examples of communities that have developed effective learning strategies based not on an individual’s "merit" but on the collaborative strength of a group, learning and working together, supporting members, and evolving into powerful collectives. Examples are taken from across the country and include a wide range of approaches, each innovative and effective. Guinier argues for reformation, not only of the very premises of admissions practices but of the shape of higher education itself.


Click for more detail about An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon Press (Aug 11, 2015)
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New York Times Bestseller

Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck


Recipient of the American Book Award

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples


Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.


Click for more detail about One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York by Arthur Browne One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York

by Arthur Browne
Beacon Press (Jun 30, 2015)
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Winner of the Christopher Award and the New York City Book Award A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910’s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.

When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America. By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as godfather to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the Hellfighters of Harlem. He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department. At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.


Click for more detail about Black Prophetic Fire by Cornel West Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West
Beacon Press (Oct 07, 2014)
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An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines.

Black Prophetic Fire with his bookWest, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both “the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century” and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois “undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century” and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even “Santaclausified” Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X’s radical spirit and fearless speech, but has “often become the victim of public amnesia.”

By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire so essential in the age of Obama.


Click for more detail about Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America by Sheryll Cashin Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America

by Sheryll Cashin
Beacon Press (May 06, 2014)
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From a nationally recognized expert, a fresh and original argument for bettering affirmative action

Race-based affirmative action had been declining as a factor in university admissions even before the recent spate of related cases arrived at the Supreme Court. Since Ward Connerly kickstarted a state-by-state political mobilization against affirmative action in the mid-1990s, the percentage of four-year public colleges that consider racial or ethnic status in admissions has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Only 45 percent of private colleges still explicitly consider race, with elite schools more likely to do so, although they too have retreated. For law professor and civil rights activist Sheryll Cashin, this isn’t entirely bad news, because as she argues, affirmative action as currently practiced does little to help disadvantaged people. The truly disadvantaged black and brown children trapped in high-poverty environs are not getting the quality schooling they need in part because backlash and wedge politics undermine any possibility for common-sense public policies. Using place instead of race in diversity programming, she writes, will better amend the structural disadvantages endured by many children of color, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment that affirmative action engenders. In Place, Not Race, Cashin reimagines affirmative action and champions place-based policies, arguing that college applicants who have thrived despite exposure to neighborhood or school poverty are deserving of special consideration. Those blessed to have come of age in poverty-free havens are not. Sixty years since the historic decision, we’re undoubtedly far from meeting the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, but Cashin offers a new framework for true inclusion for the millions of children who live separate and unequal lives. Her proposals include making standardized tests optional, replacing merit-based financial aid with need-based financial aid, and recruiting high-achieving students from overlooked places, among other steps that encourage cross-racial alliances and social mobility.

A call for action toward the long overdue promise of equality, Place, Not Race persuasively shows how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any of the marginal benefits when effective race-neutral alternatives are available.


Click for more detail about A Time to Break Silence: The Essential Works of Martin Luther King, Jr., for Students (King Legacy) by Martin Luther King, Jr. A Time to Break Silence: The Essential Works of Martin Luther King, Jr., for Students (King Legacy)

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Nov 05, 2013)
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The first collection of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essential writings for high school students and young people—with eighteen selections including "I Have a Dream," "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and "What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?"
 
“[Students] are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream… . One day historians will record this student movement as one of the most significant epics of our heritage.”
—from “The Time for Freedom Has Come”
 
A Time to Break Silence presents the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most important writings and speeches—carefully selected by teachers across a variety of disciplines—in an accessible and user-friendly volume for students. Arranged thematically in six parts, the collection includes eighteen selections and is introduced by award-winning author Walter Dean Myers. Included are some of Dr. King’s most well-known and frequently taught classic works, like “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream,” as well as lesser-known pieces such as “The Sword that Heals” and “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?,” which speak to issues young people face today.
 
Teachers guide and companion curriculum developed by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University available online through www.thekinglegacy.org/teachers


Click for more detail about The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis
Beacon Press (Jan 29, 2013)
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The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement

Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

Book Review

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In a Single Garment of Destiny:” A Global Vision of Justice by Martin Luther King, Jr. “ In a Single Garment of Destiny:” A Global Vision of Justice

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Jan 15, 2013)
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An unprecedented and timely collection that captures the global vision of Dr. King—in his own words
 
Too many people continue to think of Dr. King only as “a southern civil rights leader” or “an American Gandhi,” thus ignoring his impact on poor and oppressed people around the world. "In a Single Garment of Destiny" is the first book to treat King’s positions on global liberation struggles through the prism of his own words and activities.
 
From the pages of this extraordinary collection, King emerges not only as an advocate for global human rights but also as a towering figure who collaborated with Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert J. Luthuli, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other national and international figures in addressing a multitude of issues we still struggle with today—from racism, poverty, and war to religious bigotry and intolerance. Introduced and edited by distinguished King scholar Lewis Baldwin, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of King.


Click for more detail about Three Generations of Black Women in Motion by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley Three Generations of Black Women in Motion

by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley
Beacon Press (Jan 13, 2013)
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Originally Published in 1998 (Beacon)

A Creative nonfiction memoir about the lives and loves of three generations of American American women.

“Some say our story begins in the middle of an ocean, in the belly of a monster, at the mercy of demons. Others say that we began with a hammer and a nail; that we laid our bodies down and raised cities along our spines. But I say it goes deeper than that, deeper than cotton fields and human cargoes, the thick and heavy links of a history we’re constantly trying to break, to desire. The urge that stirs you in the middle of the night, grabs you by the spine and jerks your head upright. The story begins here, when we realize that we are no longer asleep, and the beat of our hearts sounds just like the beat of a faraway drum. And it is at this moment of unrest, when our hearts refuse to allow us to he still, that we realize what we must do, which is to gather ourselves up and move.”

Girl in the Mirror is the story of the lives, loves and migrations of three generations of American American women: a grandmother, mother and daughter-on a journey in search of self.


Click for more detail about Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son

by James Baldwin
Beacon Press (Nov 20, 2012)
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In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin’s essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro bringing renewed interest to Baldwin’s life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in "The Harlem Ghetto" to a sobering "Journey to Atlanta."

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright’s work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.

Notes is the book that established Baldwin’s voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin’s own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.


Click for more detail about Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home by Anita Hill Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home

by Anita Hill
Beacon Press (Sep 04, 2012)
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A searing portrait “of the ways in which black men and women have struggled to surmount injustice to own homes”—from the heroic lawyer who spoke out against Clarence Thomas (The New York Times Book Review)

In this “highly readable and deeply analytical” work, attorney Anita Hill examines the relationship between home ownership and the American Dream through the lens of race and gender (Library Journal). Through the stories of remarkable African American women—including her own great-great-grandmother, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Baltimore beauty-shop owner and housing-crisis survivor Anjanette Booker—she demonstrates that the inclusive democracy our Constitution promises must be conceived with home in mind.

From slavery to the Great Migration to the subprime mortgage meltdown, Reimagining Equality takes us on a journey that sparks a new conversation about what it means to be at home in America and presents concrete proposals that encourage us to reimagine equality.


Click for more detail about A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) by Michael Bronski A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)

by Michael Bronski
Beacon Press (May 15, 2012)
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Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction

A Queer History of the United States is more than a “who’s who” of queer history: it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary-source documents, literature, and cultural histories, scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s.


Click for more detail about “All Labor Has Dignity” by Martin Luther King, Jr. “All Labor Has Dignity”

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Jan 10, 2012)
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An unprecedented and timely collection of Dr. King’s speeches on labor rights and economic justice
 
Covering all the civil rights movement highlights—Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and Memphis—award-winning historian Michael K. Honey introduces and traces Dr. King’s dream of economic equality. Gathered in one volume for the first time, the majority of these speeches will be new to most readers. The collection begins with King’s lectures to unions in the 1960s and includes his addresses made during his Poor People’s Campaign, culminating with his momentous "Mountaintop" speech, delivered in support of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis. Unprecedented and timely, "All Labor Has Dignity" will more fully restore our understanding of King’s lasting vision of economic justice, bringing his demand for equality right into the present.


Click for more detail about MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image by Martin Luther King, Jr. MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Oct 25, 2011)
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 MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image is an unprecedented collection of black-and-white photographs combined with stirring quotations by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
This treasured collection includes images by legendary photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bob Adelman, and Flip Schulke, and is an unparalleled photobiography  that presents intimate moments from King’s personal and public journey. We see King in all his manifestations—as a new father and doting husband, as a civil rights champion leading racial protests, and as a charismatic speaker preaching electrifying sermons. Triumphant events like King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech and marching in Montgomery are beautifully captured,  as are private moments of him reflecting on his Nobel Peace Prize or working in his study.
 
Threaded together, these words and  images chronicle how Dr. King was not only a driving force  for change but also  a continually evolving individual. A collection to savor and celebrate, these great photographs are an enduring testament to the life and legacy of an international icon.


Click for more detail about Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington by Charles Euchner Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington

by Charles Euchner
Beacon Press (Jul 12, 2011)
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On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people—two-thirds black and one-third white—held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day—the peak of the movement—Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington.


Click for more detail about Raceball: How The Major Leagues Colonized The Black And Latin Game by Rob Ruck Raceball: How The Major Leagues Colonized The Black And Latin Game

by Rob Ruck
Beacon Press (Mar 01, 2011)
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The colliding histories of black and Latin ballplayers in the major leagues have traditionally been told as a story of their shameful segregation and redemptive integration. Jackie Robinson jumped baseball’s color line to much fanfare, but integration was painful as well as triumphal. It gutted the once-vibrant Negro Leagues and often subjected Latin players to Jim Crow racism.
 
Today, Major League Baseball tightens its grasp around the Caribbean’s burgeoning baseball academies, while at home it embraces—and exploits—the legacy of the Negro Leagues. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck explains the catalyst for this sea change while breaking down the consequences that cut across society. By looking at this history from the vantage point of black America and the Caribbean, Raceball unveils a fresh and stunning truth: baseball has never been stronger as a business, never weaker as a game.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez Morning Haiku

by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press (Jan 25, 2011)
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From a leading writer of the Black Arts Movement, poems of commemoration and loss for readers of all ages
 
A collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism.


Click for more detail about Why We Can’t Wait (King Legacy) by Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait (King Legacy)

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Jan 11, 2011)
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Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963
 
On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city’s streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders’ criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can’t Wait, which tells the story of African American activism in the spring and summer of 1963. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action.
 
Often applauded as King’s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can’t Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. Disappointed by the slow pace of school desegregation and civil rights legislation, King observed that by 1963—during which the country celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation—Asia and Africa were “moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence but we still creep at a horse-and-buggy pace.”
 
King examines the history of the civil rights struggle, noting tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality, and asserts that African Americans have already waited over three centuries for civil rights and that it is time to be proactive: “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”


Click for more detail about Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence (Revised) by Geoffrey Canada Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence (Revised)

by Geoffrey Canada
Beacon Press (Sep 28, 2010)
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A candid and riveting memoir from the founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, taking readers through his Canada in which violence stalked every street corner.

Long before the avalanche of praise for his work—from Oprah Winfrey, from President Bill Clinton, from President Barack Obama—long before he became known for his talk show appearances, Members Project spots, and documentaries like Waiting for "Superman", Geoffrey Canada was a small boy growing up scared on the mean streets of the South Bronx. His childhood world was one where “sidewalk boys” learned the codes of the block and were ranked through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Then the streets changed, and the stakes got even higher.


Click for more detail about Fist Stick Knife Gun (Graphic Novel): A Personal History of Violence by Geoffrey Canada Fist Stick Knife Gun (Graphic Novel): A Personal History of Violence

by Geoffrey Canada
Beacon Press (Sep 14, 2010)
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Long before President Barack Obama praised his work as “an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children,” and First Lady Michelle Obama called him “one of my heroes,” Geoffrey Canada was a small and scared boy growing up in the South Bronx. His childhood world was one where “sidewalk boys” learned the codes of the block and were ranked through the rituals of fist, stick, knife, and, finally, gun. In a stunning pairing, acclaimed comics creator Jamar Nicholas presents Canada’s raw and riveting account, one of the most authentic and important true stories of urban violence ever told.


Click for more detail about Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities by Patricia Hill Collins Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities

by Patricia Hill Collins
Beacon Press (Apr 01, 2010)
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An ambitious book on how schools, race, and the media intertwine in the twenty-first century

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins opens this brilliant new book on race and education by describing how in her senior year at the Philadelphia High School for girls, near the end of a public school education that "had almost silenced me," she was invited to deliver a graduation address on the meaning of the American flag. She refused to deliver the censored version her teacher demanded, and someone else took her place on stage.

Another Kind of Public Education spins the threads of that story—the way education, race, and democracy are intertwined; the way racism and resistance work through a variety of unspoken means; what schools do to limit or to open up possibilities—into a call for "another kind of public education," one that helps us "envision new democratic possibilities."

Collins begins, in a tour de force of social analysis with practical implications, by demystifying what she calls "racism as a system of power." She argues that the generation coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century—in a post-civil-rights society that publicly claims to be "color-blind"—needs a new language for analyzing the new "color-blind racism" of contemporary society that has stymied efforts to live up to the promise of American democracy.

She shows us how racism as a system of power works in four distinct yet intertwined domains—structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal. Drawing examples from schools, politics, pop culture, personal experience, and more, she demonstrates in eye-opening ways how racial inequality is manufactured and reinforced, even as we publicly espouse an ideology of color-blind fairness.

And she points, crucially, to what we can do about it. Noting that everyone is situated differently in the complex domains of power, she urges us to "think expansively about resistance," to figure out in which domain we can have the most effect in resisting racism as a system of power, and how. She also discusses classrooms around the country, teaching as a subversive activity, "cultivating countersurveillance," and the power of storytelling and media.

Blending entertaining storytelling, social theory, and practical suggestions for changing institutions, including schools, Another Kind of Public Education is both a call for change and a reminder that public education—in every sense—is at the heart of American democratic possibilities.


Click for more detail about Three Plays: The Political Theater of Howard Zinn: Emma, Marx in Soho, Daughter of Venus by Howard Zinn Three Plays: The Political Theater of Howard Zinn: Emma, Marx in Soho, Daughter of Venus

by Howard Zinn
Beacon Press (Mar 01, 2010)
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World-renowned historian Howard Zinn has turned to drama to explore the legacy of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and to delve into the intricacies of political and social conscience perhaps more deeply than traditional history permits. Three Plays brings together all this work, including the previously unpublished Daughter of Venus, along with a new introductory essay on political theater, and prefaces to each of the plays.


Click for more detail about Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (King Legacy) by Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (King Legacy)

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 2010)
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Martin Luther King, Jr.’s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth." It traces the phenomenal journey of a community, and shows how the twenty-six-year-old Dr. King, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transformed the nation-and the world.


Click for more detail about Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community? (King Legacy) by Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community? (King Legacy)

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 2010)
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In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this significantly prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, we find King’s acute analysis of American race relations and the state of the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts. Here he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America’s future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, powerfully asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.


Click for more detail about The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease by Jonathan Metzl The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease

by Jonathan Metzl
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 2010)
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A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness

The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History by Thomas Norman DeWolf Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History

by Thomas Norman DeWolf
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 2009)
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In 2001, Thomas DeWolf discovered that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in U.S. history, responsible for transporting at least ten thousand Africans. This is his memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced their ancestors’ steps through the notorious triangle trade route—from New England to West Africa to Cuba—and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Can We Talk About Race?: And Other Conversations In An Era Of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum Can We Talk About Race?: And Other Conversations In An Era Of School Resegregation

by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Beacon Press (Apr 01, 2008)
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Major new reflections on race and schools—by the best-selling author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?“

A Simmons College/Beacon Press Race, Education, and Democracy Series Book

Beverly Daniel Tatum emerged on the national scene in 1997 with “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?,“ a book that spoke to a wide audience about the psychological dynamics of race relations in America. Tatum’s unique ability to get people talking about race captured the attention of many, from Oprah Winfrey to President Clinton, who invited her to join him in his nationally televised dialogues on race.

In her first book since that pathbreaking success, Tatum starts with a warning call about the increasing but underreported resegregation of America. A selfdescribed “integration baby“—she was born in 1954—Tatum sees our growing isolation from each other as deeply problematic, and she believes that schools can be key institutions for forging connections across the racial divide.

In this ambitious, accessible book, Tatum examines some of the most resonant issues in American education and race relations:

  • The need of African American students to see themselves reflected in curricula and institutions
  • How unexamined racial attitudes can negatively affect minority-student achievement
  • The possibilities—and complications—of intimate crossracial friendships

Tatum approaches all these topics with the blend of analysis and storytelling that make her one of our most persuasive and engaging commentators on race.

Can We Talk About Race? launches a collaborative lecture and book series between Beacon Press and Simmons College, which aims to reinvigorate a crucial national public conversation on race, education and democracy.


Click for more detail about White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education by Noliwe Rooks White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education

by Noliwe Rooks
Beacon Press (May 01, 2007)
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The history of African American studies is often told as a heroic tale, with compelling images of black power and passionate African American students who refused to take no for an answer. Noliwe M. Rooks argues for the recognition of another story, which proves that many of the programs that survived actually began as a result of white philanthropy. With unflinching honesty, Rooks shows that the only way to create a stable future for African American studies is by confronting its complex past.


Click for more detail about On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century by Sherrilyn A. Ifill On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century

by Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Beacon Press (Feb 15, 2007)
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Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill’s On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious.

On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence, while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today.

Inspired by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects of racial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue.

A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching’s long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.

?Professor Ifill has written a sobering and eye-opening book on one of America’s darkest secrets. On the Courthouse Lawn offers a compelling examination of lynchings and describes the failure of people and institutions to adequately address one of America’s tragedies. Racial amnesia would suggest we forget this history. Professor Ifill assures us that we cannot?and should not?forget it. This is a must read for anyone willing to examine our history carefully and learn from it.” ?Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice

?On the Courthouse Lawn is an elegantly written and persuasively argued case for local communities to confront their history of lynching and racial violence as a means of healing race relations. Explaining how Truth and Reconciliation worked in South Africa, Ifill explores the possibilities and offers concrete advice on how it could be widely employed in the United States. It is certainly worth trying.” ?Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

?In calm, objective but no less moving detail, Sherrilyn Ifill’s book provides the stories that illuminate the photographs and postcards of lynchings, the punishment meted out to some 5,000 black people deemed guilty without trial for matters large and small during the first half of the twentieth century. Too late for justice for the victims of lynch law, Professor Ifill urges that an American version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission could bring long-denied acknowledgment to whites and a measure of consolation to blacks.” ?Derrick Bell, author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well and Ethical Ambition


Click for more detail about African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame by Anne C. Bailey African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame

by Anne C. Bailey
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 2006)
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It’s an awful story. It’s an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now?—Chief Awusa of Atorkor

For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade.

Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory.


Click for more detail about Kindred by Octavia Butler Kindred

by Octavia Butler
Beacon Press (Feb 01, 2004)
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Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.


Click for more detail about Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife by Carleen Brice Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife

by Carleen Brice
Beacon Press (May 16, 2003)
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Maya Angelou, J. California Cooper, Pearl Cleage, Nikki Giovanni, Susan L. Taylor, Alice Walker, and more.

Finally, a collection that celebrates, considers, contemplates, even criticizes’ midlife’ from a black woman’s point of view. Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number ranges over every aspect of black women’s lives: personal growth, family and friendship, love and sexuality, health, beauty, illness, spirituality, creativity, financial independence, work, and scores of other topics.

Midlife today isn’t your grandmother’s’ change of life.’ Today, black women call hot flashes ’power surges,’ and menopause, the ’pause that refreshes.’ These days, middle-aged women may be newlyweds or new mothers, as well as grandmothers or widows. They may experience the empty-nest syndrome and then the ’return-to-the-nest syndrome’ as adult children move back home. They may navigate the field of Internet dating, travel the world, teach homeless women, take up pottery, or study international business.


Click for more detail about Case for Black Reparations by Boris I. Bittker Case for Black Reparations

by Boris I. Bittker
Beacon Press (May 15, 2003)
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The groundbreaking first book on black reparations, essential reading for the twenty-first century

Originally published in 1972, Boris Bittker’s riveting study of America’s debt to African-Americans was well ahead of its time. Published by Toni Morrison when she was an editor, the book came from an unlikely source: Bittker was a white professor of law at Yale University who had long been ambivalent about the idea of reparations. Through his research into the history and theory of reparations-namely the development and enforcement of lawsdesigned to compensate groups for injustices imposed on them-he found that it wasn’t a “crazy, far-fetched idea.” In fact, beginning with post-Civil War demands for forty acres and a mule, African-American thinkers have long made the case that compensatory measures are justified not only for the injury of slavery but for the further setbacks of almost a century of Jim Crow laws and forced school and job segregation, measures that effectively blocked African-Americans from enjoying the privileges of citizenship.

The publication of important recent books by black scholars like Randall Robinson and the growth of a highly vocal reparations movement in the beginning of this century make this book, long unavailable, essential reading. Bittker carefully illuminates the historical provisions and statutes for legitimate claims to reparations, the national and international precedents for such claims, and most important, the obstacles to a national policy of reparations.


Click for more detail about The Cruel Years: American Voices at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by William L. Katz The Cruel Years: American Voices at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

by William L. Katz
Beacon Press (Apr 15, 2003)
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The Cruel Years provides readers with a vivid picture of what life was like a hundred years ago, not for the rich and famous but for ordinary working Americans. The story is told in the words of twenty-two fascinating people who lived by laboring long hours at farms and factories and mines. A preface by Howard Zinn and an introduction by William Loren Katz provide an easy-to-follow historical map that places these hard-hitting, first-person narratives in the context of their troubled times and within the larger picture of U.S. growth and development.

Here are the no-nonsense words of a young immigrant trying to survive as a sweatshop operator in New York City, a hard working farmer’s wife who has writing ambitions; a black southern sharecropper seeking fulfillment under a new system of slavery; a young Puerto Rican passing the Statue of Liberty and ready for new challenges; a Chinese immigrant, a Mexican immigrant, and a Japanese immigrant struggling to rise from lower rungs on the social and economic ladder; an Irish girl of sixteen deciding to become a political agitator; a black southern woman trying to fend off the hurts of Jim Crow; a coal miner telling of the lethal dangers of his work; and a black cowhand rejoicing in the thrill of the cattle trails.


Click for more detail about Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South by Trudier Harris Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South

by Trudier Harris
Beacon Press (Apr 15, 2003)
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A wide-ranging, spirited collection of personal essays about growing up black and Southern

Like Maya Angelou and bell hooks before her, Trudier Harris explores her complicated identity as a black woman in the American South. By turns amusing and probing, Summer Snow lays out in a series of linked essays the formative experiences that shaped Harris into the writer and intellectual she has become.

With passion and eloquence, Harris writes about the creation of her unique first name, how porch-sitting is in fact a creative Southern tradition, and how insecurities over her black hair ("the ubiquitous hair") factored into her self-image. She writes about being a "black nerd" as a child, and how the black church influenced her in her early years. But she also writes about more troubling topics, such as the price blacks have paid for integration, and the "staying power of racism." In one moving piece, Harris remembers a white teenager propositioning her for sex in exchange for five dollars. Unflinching in her assessment of white Southern culture, yet deeply attached to a South
many black intellectuals have abandoned, Harris in Summer Snow takes readers on a surprising tour of one woman’s life, loves, and lessons.

Trudier Harris is the author of numerousbooks, including Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature and Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. She is currently a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Praise for Summer Snow:

"Stimulating and provocative, SUMMER SNOW resonates with folkloric energy and vividly evocative prose. Trudier Harris’s presence and voice vibrate through this journey, guiding her reader with the sheer force of her rigor, grace, and intelligence as well as a goodly amount of wry humor and wit. A reader’s dream-book, reminding us all of the resonant claim of southern spaces."
— Karla Holloway, William Kenan Professor of English at Duke University, author of numerous books, including Passed On.

"Trudier Harris speaks of the "cotton-pickin’ authority" of those in her childhood who earned respect because of their life-long backbreaking labors in the fields. Harris has translated that authority into one of her own, the authority of her words. Because of this author, we see, feel, understand and celebrate our people, who created—through sheer wit and will—a culture that defeated the dehumanization of slavery by keeping us, body and soul alive. A wonderful book you have to read to believe."
—Toi Derricotte, author of The Black Notebooks.

"Noon can be as blinding as midnight; snow no less than sun can cause a
vision distortion. Like Zora Neale Hurston, another great daughter of
the South, Harris lets her vision be tempered by her love. And make no
mistake, the South of Black Americans, is a love story. SUMMER SNOW
reminds us of that… causes us to remember that… lets us celebrate
that."
—Nikki Giovanni

"SUMMER SNOW is the classic we have been waiting for—the classic that
only a "Black daughter of the South" could have written. It has dance and song, color and texture, pathos and humor, analysis and introspection, and a gallery of fascinating women and men
we can never forget."
—Gloria Wade Gayles, author of PUSHED BACK TO STRENGTH

Book Review

Click for more detail about You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train: A Personal History Of Our Times by Howard Zinn You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train: A Personal History Of Our Times

by Howard Zinn
Beacon Press (Sep 05, 2002)
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Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, tells his personal stories about more than thirty years of fighting for social change, from teaching at Spelman College to recent protests against war.

A former bombardier in WWII, Zinn emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice. Although he’s a fierce critic, he gives us reason to hope that by learning from history and engaging politically, we can make a difference in the world.


Click for more detail about The Condemnation of Little B. by Elaine Brown The Condemnation of Little B.

by Elaine Brown
Beacon Press (Feb 18, 2002)
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Through the story of a thirteen-year-old black boy condemned to life in prison, Elaine Brown exposes the "New Age" racism that effectively condemns millions of poor African-Americans to a third world life. The story of "Little B" is riveting, a stunning example of the particular burden racism imposes on black youths. Most astonishing, almost all of the officials involved in bringing him to "justice" are black.

Michael Lewis was officially declared a ward of the state at age eleven, and then systematically ignored until his arrest for murder. Brown wondered how this boy could possibly have aroused so much public resentment, why he was being tried (and roundly condemned, labeled a "super-predator") in the press. Then she met Michael and began investigating his case on her own. Brown adeptly builds a convincing case that the prosecution railroaded Michael, looking for a quick, symbolic conviction. His innocence is almost incidental to the overwhelming evidence that the case was unfit for trial. Little B was convicted long before he came to court, and effectively sentenced years before, when the "safety net" allowed him to slip silently down. Brown cites studies and cases from all over America that reveal how much more likely youth of color are to be convicted of crimes and to serve long—even life—sentences, and how deeply the new black middle class is implicated in this devastating reality.


Click for more detail about Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans by Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans

by Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander
Beacon Press (Oct 12, 2001)
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Through stories (including their own), interviews, and analysis of the most recent data available, Dr. Alvin Poussaint and journalist Amy Alexander offer a groundbreaking look at “posttraumatic slavery syndrome,” the unique physical and emotional perils for black people that are the legacy of slavery and persistent racism. They examine the historical, cultural, and social factors that make many blacks reluctant to seek health care, and cite ways that everyone from the layperson to the health care provider can help


Click for more detail about Who’s Qualified? by Lani Guinier Who’s Qualified?

by Lani Guinier
Beacon Press (Sep 01, 2001)
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Affirmative action originated as a plan to correct the historical disadvantage of women and people of color—to make the system more fair. Yet, for over twenty years, it has been repeatedly attacked for being unfair to whites, and even un-American. Guinier and Sturm begin with a critique of affirmative action as it stands now, arguing that a system of selection that determines ’qualification’ from test scores and then adds on factors like race and gender doesn’t work—either for the people it includes or the people it leaves out. But they go further, asking us to rethink how we evaluate merit. Marshaling lively examples from education and the workplace, they expose the failure of tests to predict success. They provide evidence that people’s success depends on the opportunities they have to perform, and that institutions do best when they are open to unanticipated contributions. Offering a model of selection based on performance, not prediction, the authors’ reconception of an old ideal suggests at once a smart business practice and a step toward the promise of democratic opportunity. Paul Osterman, Stephen Steinberg, Peter Sacks, and others respond.

NEW DEMOCRACY FORUM

A series of short paperback originals exploring creative solutions to our most urgent national concerns. The series editors (for Boston Review), Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, aim to foster politically engaged, intellectually honest, and morally serious debate about fundamental issues—both on and off the agenda of conventional politics.


Click for more detail about Mother to Mother (Bluestreak) by Sindiwe Magona Mother to Mother (Bluestreak)

by Sindiwe Magona
Beacon Press (Sep 15, 2000)
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Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to organize the nation’s first ever democratic elections in 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown. She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor’s son. Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day. The book is based on this real-life incident, and takes the form of an epistle to Amy Biehl’s mother. The murderer’s mother, Mandisi, writes about her life, the life of her child, and the colonized society that not only allowed, but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. The result is not an apology for the murder, but a beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence.


Click for more detail about Song For Anninho by Gayl Jones Song For Anninho

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Apr 30, 2000)
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This exquisite book-length poem is set in colonial Brazil, following the destruction of Palmares, the last of seven fugitive slave enclaves beset by the Portuguese. Amid the flight and reenslavement of its inhabitants emerges the love story of Anninho and Almeyda, former African slaves. Song for Anninho offers readers some of Gayl Jones’s very best verse.


Click for more detail about Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Bluestreak) by Sonia Sanchez Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Bluestreak)

by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press (Apr 07, 2000)
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An extraordinary retrospective covering over thirty years of work, Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-winning Sonia Sanchez.


Click for more detail about Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral by Jessie Redmon Fauset Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral

by Jessie Redmon Fauset
Beacon Press (Dec 15, 1999)
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Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes


Click for more detail about Iola Leroy by Frances E. W. Harper Iola Leroy

by Frances E. W. Harper
Beacon Press (Dec 10, 1999)
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Iola Leroy was originally published in 1892, during a time of black disenfranchisement, lynching, and Jim Crow laws. It is the story of a "refined mulatto" raised to believe she’s white until she and her mother are sold into slavery. Iola becomes an outspoken advocate for her people and a critic of race-mixing. Her story offers an important portrait of black life during the Civil War and Reconstruction.


Click for more detail about Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America by Cornel West Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America

by Cornel West
Beacon Press (Jan 27, 1999)
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’Cornel West is one of the most authentic, brilliant, prophetic, and healing voices in America today’ —Marian Wright Edelman

Nine of America’s most influential artists, scholars, and public figures-Maya Angelou, Bill Bradley, Harry Belafonte, Patricia Williams, Wynton Marsalis, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, James Washington, James Forbes, and Haki Madhubuti-talk with Cornel West about their political awareness, art and politics, and the possibility of hope among African-Americans today.


Click for more detail about The Healing by Gayl Jones The Healing

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1999)
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Gayl Jones’s special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic

Gayl Jones’s first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva’s Man, by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike, Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman, and James Baldwin, to name a few. The publication of The Healing, her first novel in over twenty years, is a literary event.

Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer, traveling by bus to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a minor rock star’s manager, and before that a beautician. She’s had a fling with her rock star’s ex-husband and an Afro-German horse dealer; along the way she’s somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman in Africa. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards, drawing us constantly deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale-the story of her first healing.

The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlan’s memories in a language rich with the textured cadences of the black Southerner, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic-and unexpected-beginning.


Click for more detail about Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems (Bluestreak) by Sonia Sanchez Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems (Bluestreak)

by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1999)
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Like the Singing Coming off the Drums is a dazzling exploration of the intimate and public landscapes of passion from one of our master poets. In haiku, tanka, and sensual blues, Sonia Sanchez writes of the many forms love takes: burning, dreamy, disappointed, vulnerable. With words that revel and reveal, she shares love’s painful beauty.


Click for more detail about If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (Bluestreak Series) by Ntozake Shange If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (Bluestreak Series)

by Ntozake Shange
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1999)
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Acclaimed artist Ntozake Shange offers this delightfully eclectic tribute to black cuisine as a food of life that reflects the spirit and history of a people. With recipes such as "Cousin Eddie’s Shark with Breadfruit" and "Collard Greens to Bring You Money," Shange instructs us in the nuances of a cuisine born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, spiced by the jazz of Duke Ellington, and shared by all members of the African Diaspora. Rich with personal memories and historical insight, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is a vivid story of the migration of a people, and the cuisine that marks their living legacy and celebration of taste.


Click for more detail about Renaissance by Ruth Forman Renaissance

by Ruth Forman
Beacon Press (Dec 30, 1998)
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Renaissance, Ruth Forman’s second collection, speaks of the timeless themes of family, death, love, and rebirth in the inimitable voice Booklist called ’sexy, bittersweet, funny, feisty, and real.’ With poetry that conveys a defiant, enlivened spirit and has won her acclaim, Ruth Forman measures the losses and celebrates the future of a generation.


Click for more detail about Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America by Geoffrey Canada Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America

by Geoffrey Canada
Beacon Press (Dec 10, 1998)
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Geoffrey Canada explores, through passionately observed storytelling, what we are truly telling our boys about manhood. He lays out the little-understood and intertwined history of drugs and marketing to inner-city boys, a history that has led to consumption levels of forties and blunts that are excessive beyond excuse. Canada takes a hard look at the issues of too-early sex and, through a pointed story of his own sexual education on the streets, reminds us that the combination of the same old urges with new cultural forces and mores has resulted in a volatile sexual terrain for boys. He writes indelibly of the young boy he once was, one desperately needing a father’s love, and of the crucial issues—fatherhood, mentors, self-esteem, faith, healing, and more—that must be negotiated as boys reach up for manhood. A moving and revelatory report by a dedicated father and gifted child advocate.


Click for more detail about Like the Singing Coming off the Drums by Sonia Sanchez Like the Singing Coming off the Drums

by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press (Feb 03, 1998)
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In the movie "lovejones", in "Vibe" magazine, and on rapper D-Knowledge’s CD, Sonia Sanchez’s love poems have put into words the passions of a generation. Now comes a collection of new love poems from Sanchez, dedicated to such icons of our age as Tupac Shakur and Ella Fitzgerald, that takes readers from the most intimate landscapes of passion to its public celebration National ads & publicity. .


Click for more detail about Does Your House Have Lions ? by Sonia Sanchez Does Your House Have Lions ?

by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press (Jan 28, 1998)
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Nominated for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

Recommended Reading from Emerge

An epic poem on kin estranged, the death of a brother from AIDS, and the possibility of reconciliation and love in the face of loss.


Click for more detail about Wounded in the House of A Friend (Bluestreak) by Sonia Sanchez Wounded in the House of A Friend (Bluestreak)

by Sonia Sanchez
Beacon Press (Apr 30, 1997)
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Renowned African-American poet Sonia Sanchez explores the pain, self-doubt, and anger that emerge in women’s lives: an unfaithful life partner, a brutal rape, the murder of a woman by her granddaughter, the ravages of drugs. Sanchez transforms the unspoken and sometimes violent betrayals of our lives into a liberating vision of connection in emotional redemption, compassion, and self-fulfillment.


Click for more detail about Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman Jesus and the Disinherited

by Howard Thurman
Beacon Press (Nov 30, 1996)
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In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900-1981) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower—it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God’s justice prevail.


Click for more detail about My Soul is a Witness: African-American Women’s Spirituality by Gloria Wade-Gayles My Soul is a Witness: African-American Women’s Spirituality

by Gloria Wade-Gayles
Beacon Press (Oct 30, 1996)
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My Soul Is a Witness is a powerful collection of poetry, prose, reflections, prayer, and song celebrating spirituality in the lives of African-American women.


Click for more detail about Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity

by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley
Beacon Press (Jan 31, 1995)
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What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time.

Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity.

Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.


Click for more detail about Wasting America’s Future: The Children’s Defense Fund Report on the Costs of Child Poverty by Marian Wright Edelman Wasting America’s Future: The Children’s Defense Fund Report on the Costs of Child Poverty

by Marian Wright Edelman
Beacon Press (Oct 31, 1994)
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The Health and Human Services poverty line for a three-person family in America is $11,800 in annual income. One in every five American children is growing up in poverty. What does child poverty mean for the economic and societal future of our country? The Children's Defense Fund, widely considered the most powerful force for children in America, has assembled expert and ground-breaking information on how poverty affects health, childhood deaths, low birth weight, and injury; on the insidious connections between low family income and learning disabilities; on links between poverty, abuse, and neglect and self-esteem; and much more. Wasting America's Future is the crucial citizen's handbook as we continue the national debate on welfare reform.


Click for more detail about We Are Young Magicians by Ruth Forman We Are Young Magicians

by Ruth Forman
Beacon Press (Apr 01, 1993)
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Winner of the 1992 Barnard New Women Poets Prize


Click for more detail about Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia, 1800 by Arna Bontemps Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia, 1800

by Arna Bontemps
Beacon Press (Apr 01, 1992)
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’Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 slave revolt allowed Bontemps to warn of the rebellion that would come of poverty and racial oppression. This metaphor of revolution is at the same time a highly pertinent representation of black masculinity that will reward students of gender, slavery and the sensibilities of the 1930s.’

-Nell Irvin Painter


Click for more detail about Drugstore Cat by Ann Petry Drugstore Cat

by Ann Petry
Beacon Press (Sep 01, 1988)
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A little cat with a short temper tries to learn the difficult lesson of patience and self-restraint.


Click for more detail about Eva’s Man by Gayl Jones Eva’s Man

by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Mar 05, 1987)
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Imprisoned for the bizarre murder of her lover, Eva Medina Canada recalls a life tormented by sexual abuse and emotional violence. Eva’s Man is Gayl Jones’s second novel.


Click for more detail about Great Slave Narratives by Arna Bontemps Great Slave Narratives

by Arna Bontemps
Beacon Press (Jan 30, 1987)
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Great Slave Narratives is a Beacon Press publication.


Click for more detail about Heredity by Patricia Storace Heredity

by Patricia Storace
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1987)
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East of Broadway

by Raquel Cepeda
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1970)
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Publication date to be determined.

East of Broadway, is a collection of collection of interconnected essays about Cepeda’s beloved Inwood, considered the last working-class enclave in Manhattan. The book explores the shifting process of gentrification through the prism of Cepeda’s life as a native dominiyorker and lifelong resident. Cepeda straddles the line between the gentry and gentrified, Black and white America, and her own hyphenated identity, while being quite literally and spiritually located at the invisible border wall dividing the neighborhood between east and west of Broadway. The book will explore belonging, what it means to be authentic, embracing change, and the spiritual and tangible consequences of gentrification that threatens to eat away at the soul of a once piquant and diverse community.