General African American Studies

"The most powerful spiritual healer, fixer, teacher on the planet." --Oprah Winfrey In an updated and expanded 25th anniversary edition, the beloved "purple book" Acts of Faith guides people of color with daily encouragement, comfort, and enlightenment...

"The question about teaching slaves to read and write remained a dilemma throughout the entire slave period. The slave master knew that to teach the slave to read and write he might ultimately emerge as a thinker. These thinkers would inevitably question...

The first popular history of the former American slaves who founded, ruled, and lost Africa's first republic In 1820, a group of about eighty African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa, to a place they would name after...

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

A recently discovered collection of folktales celebrating African American oral tradition, community, and faith...”splendidly vivid and true.”--New York Times Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that...

A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like--from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue.   "Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful...

A moving essay collection promoting freedom, self-love, and divine wholeness for Black women and opening new levels of understanding and ideological transformation for non-Black women and allies "Candice Marie Benbow is a once-in-a-generation theologian,...

In 1945, Ebony's legendary founder John H. Johnson set out to create a magazine for Black America much like that of the trailblazing Life Magazine, and that he did.   For the African American community, Ebony has been a breath of fresh air,...

In these turbulent times, defined by ideological chasms, clashes over social justice, and a pandemic intersecting with misinformation, Americans seem hopelessly divided along fault lines of politics, race, religion, class, and culture. Yet not everyone...

Classic collection of black history and triviaFirst published in 1934 and revised in 1962, this book gathers journalist and historian Joel Augustus Rogers' columns from the syndicated newspaper feature titled Your History. Patterned after the look of...

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young...

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism...

Black people are dying everywhere we turn, in the faces we see and the headlines we read, and we feel emotional pain, but we don't know how to tackle it--it's time to recognize it and work through our trauma.   Terrie had made it: she had...

With more than two million copies in print, Manchild in the Promised Land is one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time--the definitive account of African-American youth in Harlem of the 1940s and 1950s, and a seminal work of modern...

"A firsthand, eye-opening story of a prosecutor that exposes the devastating criminal punishment system. Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page." --Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an...