General African American Studies

"Black people are not dark-skinned white people," says advertising visionary Tom Burrell. In fact, they are a lot more. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly...

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.   Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America...

An "unsparing, erudite, and incisive" (Jelani Cobb) reframing of the past and present of Black resistance--both nonviolent and violent--to white supremacy Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther...

An informed, provocative, astute consideration of salvific alternatives to contemporary policing and imprisonment. -- Starred Review, Kirkus [Purnell] draws convincing parallels between the past and the present to demonstrate that today's policing...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama "guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race"...

Everyone needs to love and be loved--even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. In The Will to Change, bell hooks...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same."--Time James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about...

Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight—until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn’t commit. The Volokh...

Oprah's Book Club Summer 2018 Selection The Instant New York Times Bestseller A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit. "An amazing and...

Once in a while a book comes along that projects the spirit of an era; this is one of them . . . Vibrant and expressive . . . A well-researched and well-written work. --The Philadelphia Inquirer With the rallying cry of Black Power! in 1966, a group of...

Featuring 117 full-color photos and eight breathtaking essays on a force that fuels Black life all around the globe, this is Humans of New York meets The Black Book "A patchwork quilt of visually stunning images, captured moments of triumph, antidotes...

A groundbreaking exposé of racism in the American taxation system from a law professor and expert on tax policy "Important reading for those who want to understand how inequality is built into the bedrock of American society, and what a more equitable...

From an award-winning journalist, a searing exposé of the effects of the mass incarceration crisis on families -- including the 2.7 million American children who have a parent locked up.  In The Shadow System, award-winning journalist...

Contains two essays by Martin Luther King Jr. concerning the role of violence in the civil rights movement. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Robert Williams organized armed self-defense against the racist violence of the Ku Klux Klan. This...

The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women's rights pioneer Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks's courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train...