Cultural Literature

"A story for the ages." --New York Times The defense lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Selma marchers and other civil rights heroes reveals the true story of the historic trial that made Dr. King a national hero. Fred D. Gray was one of...

Some comics fans view the industry's Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the...

Dhyani Ywahoo is a member of the traditional Etowah Band of the Eastern Tsalagi (Cherokee) Nation. Trained by her grandparents, she is the twenty-seventh generation to carry the ancestral wisdom of the Ywahoo lineage. Charged with the duty to rekindle...

A bruisingly honest memoir of addiction and recovery from one of the greatest pitchers of all time.With fresh and sober eyes, Dwight Gooden shares the most intimate moments of his successes and failures, from endless self-destructive drug binges to three...

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's...

An unforgettable and stirring memoir in the vein of Free Cyntoia, Just Mercy, and The Sum of Us that both inspires and upends our understanding about the future of policing in the United States.In 2012, nineteen-year-old Leon Ford was shot five times by...

The Path to Freedom in Missouri and Illinois People enslaved here experienced the same horrors as those held captive in other states, and their stories of courage and perseverance are amazing. Priscilla Baltimore purchased her own emancipation and...

Even academically talented students face challenges in college. For high-achieving Black women, their racial, gender, and academic identities intensify those issues. Inside the classroom, they are spotlighted and feel forced to be representatives for...

"The most comprehensive reference source on African-American athletes yet compiled."--San Francisco ChronicleWith a Foreword by Jeanne Moutoussamy-AsheAvailable once again for a new generation of readers, the second volume in Arthur Ashe's epic trilogy...

In Annotations Nahum Dimitri Chandler offers a philosophical interpretation of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1897 American Negro Academy address, "The Conservation of Races." Chandler approaches Du Bois as a generative and original philosophical thinker-writer on...

Nelson Mandela is well-known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman -- the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before...

Probing, entertaining and agitating.--Essence By the acclaimed and controversial author of Why Black People Tend to Shout, this is an unblinking look at African-American life, including explosive essays on education, Rodney King, multiculturalism, and...

THIS RICHLY INFORMATIVE JOURNEY INTO THE 1970S CAPTURES THE EXPLOSIVE POWER OF THE BLACK PERFORMERS, MUSICIANS, FILMMAKERS, AND ATHLETES WHO IGNITED A CULTURAL REVOLUTION. WHAT SINGER/SONGWRITER WAS THE FIRST WHITE PERFORMER TO APPEAR ON SOUL TRAIN?WHAT...

Apartheid isn't over--so Malaika Wa Azania boldly argues in Memoirs of a Born Free, her account of growing up black in modern-day South Africa. Malaika was born in late 1991, as the white minority government was on its way out, making her a Born...

Cleveland's Gospel Music documents the history of black gospel music from the 1920s through the 1980s. The gospel quartet groups, radio announcers, solo artists, and promoters established Cleveland as the gospel singers' metropolitan hub. An integral...

In the tradition of James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Robeson's A Black Way of Seeing melds history and analysis in a sweeping panorama of the present moment as we know it to be--scathing in its understanding of why Black empowerment has failed and...