General African American Studies

As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done...

A kaleidoscopic account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the...

Cities are nothing without the streets--the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street, Jessica D. Klanderud documents the...

Black women are the single most religious demographic in the United States, yet they are among the poorest, least educated, and least healthy groups in the nation. Drawing on the author's own past experience as an evangelical minister and her present...

The personal account of one man's groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in the countless oft-overlooked former slave dwellings that still stand across the country, the fascinating history behind those sites, and how he has used the experiences to...

A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it's too late--from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight...

A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa's Greenwood district, or "Black Wall Street," that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood,...

African Americans' unique encounter with the Bible has shaped centuries of spirituality and the social engagement of a whole continent. In The Bible and African Americans, highly respected biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush outlines different ways African...

What is the essence of black dance in America? To answer that question, Brenda Dixon Gottschild maps an unorthodox 'geography', the geography of the black dancing body, to show the central place black dance has in American culture. From the feet to the...

Political culture is one of the central, but most difficult, concepts in political science. Culture and Politics: A Reader explores this concept by compiling previously-published works that focus on the core themes of political culture research: Concepts...

The first critical analysis of how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis. In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white "new face" of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses...

A remarkable new poetry collection from Clint Smith, the #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Critics Circle award-winning author of How the Word Is Passed. Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional...

A hopeful, wise, and practical guide to help us move into spaces of individual and collective healing, community, and relationship building--with practices to shed our isolation, connect, and thrive. ​In times of isolation, heartbreak, and...

A timely and significant examination of how Black athletes have used their influence to create meaningful change and reform for Black Americans. In the age of social media, athletes have a powerful influence like never before. Many Black athletes have...

The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility (Saidiya Hartman). A singular...