Cultural Literature

Since 2020, debates on anti-Black racism and other social determinants of Black mental health have intensified in Canadian society. However, despite the efforts made, the feeling that social disparities and interpersonal, institutional and systemic...

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic traces the origins of theatre, dance, and concert singing in Canada and their connection to British and American song and dance traditions. When theatrical acts first appeared in the late eighteenth century, chattel...

A long overdue volume which re-establishes Vivian Browne as an important and dynamic American artist with an expressive hand and expansive world view.Vivian Browne's (1929-1993) varied career spanned more than three decades, from her early portraits and...

The first full retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s-2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and societyJack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to...

A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author...

Revealing the central role of Black activists in spurring interracial solidarity in the US labor movement. Most accounts of interracial solidarity focus on white union activists. In Freedom Train, Cedric de Leon, a former organizer and elected leader in...

In supreme night, the troubles of double consciousness and anti-Black violence recede into the temporary haven of night. In poet Keith Donnell Jr.'s imagination, the cover of darkness, both familiar and mysterious, is transcendent. Here, oppressed...

A mysterious name initiates a journey to discover one family's past, and reveals more than was expected It began with a name. Sancho. Gleaned from the memory of his oldest living relative, that name set author Keith Rushing on a quest to recover his...

A determined journalist's account of rising to Pulitzer Prize-winning heightsUnder the Sun: A Black Journalist's Journey is Harold Jackson's powerful memoir that chronicles his path from a Birmingham, Alabama, housing project in the 1950s and '60s to...

2021: As the centennial of one of the nation's worst race massacres approached, citizens of Tulsa faced the prospect with hope and dread. Hope that the anniversary would show Tulsa had changed since that day in 1921, when a white mob left the city's...

"Toni Morrison once said, 'The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction.' In The Moment, Bakari Sellers brilliantly and precisely cuts through the noise of the calculated, well-financed, and relentless campaign by conservative media,...

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self-aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn...

From the creator of "a unified field theory of racism" (NPR's Planet Money), a dollars-and-cents reckoning of the state of Black America and a new framework to close the power gap Historically, Black Americans' quest for power has been understood as an...

The remarkable life story of Ella Jenkins, "The First Lady of Children's Music." Ella Jenkins was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Her songs "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song" and "Who Fed the Chickens?" are...

"It's an invaluable insider account of a pressing social issue." - Publishers Weekly Joining the ranks of Evicted and The New Jim Crow, a former caseworker's searing, clear-eyed investigation of the child welfare system--from foster care to...

The Life of a TrailblazerMatilda Arabella Evans was born four years after the abolition of slavery and raised on a family farm in eastern Aiken County. She was the first African American woman in South Carolina to obtain a medical license and fervently...