Cultural Literature

Poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones, vividly recounts his crusading role in African American literature. A driving force behind the Black Arts Movement, the prolific Baraka retells his...

"Celebrate Kwanzaa" continues the spectacular Holidays Around the World series by focusing on this African-American holiday, which falls during the festive, gift-giving season and is celebrated by families, communities, and schools throughout America...

Haki R. Madhubuti is a poet, publisher, editor, and educator who has authored and edited twenty-three books, including the best-selling Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? He is the founder of Third World Press, and cofounder of the Institute of...

"I believe in an America in which opportunity and justice truly are for all. That was the essence of the life an poetry of Langston Hughes."--Senator John Kerry, from the Preface A beautifully designed collection of some of the greatest poems by a...

Even before the civil rights movement, African-American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. In her revelatory book, Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Maya Angelou writes like a song, and like the truth."--The New York Times Book Review "Everything about Maya Angelou is transcendental. She has something to tell you now. Listen."--Robert Fulghum, The Washington Post Book...

As a child, Bebe Moore spent her school years in Philadelphia, in a world of women. Surrounded by clouds of Emeraude and Chanel, supported by the strength of her mother, grandmother, aunts, and teachers, she learned by example to mind her p's and q's, to...

Originally published in 1954, Richard Wright's "Black Power" is an extraordinary nonfiction work by one of America's premier literary giants of the twentieth century. An impassioned chronicle of the author's trip to Africa's Gold Coast before it became...

An extraordinary tribute to the civil rights movement is seen through the eyes of a mother and daughter--on parallel journeys that encompass the voices of two generations.Patricia Stephens Due fought for justice during the height of the Civil Rights era...

This is the travel journal of an African American visiting his mother's homeland of Ghana. The book offers a range of emotions from the author including the highs of meeting relatives he'd only heard about and the lows of visiting a slave dungeon for the...

During a dramatic three-day period in March 1961, nine students from historically Black Tougaloo College staged sit-ins at the all-White Main Library in Jackson, Mississippi. The students conducted their protest and were arrested, held in jail overnight,...

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used...