Cultural Literature

Based on police wiretaps and exclusive interviews with drug kingpins and hip-hop insiders, this is the untold story of how the streets and housing projects of southeast Queens took over the rap industry.For years, rappers from Nas to Ja Rule have...

Essential reading on segregation now in paperback! "Medley deftly puts in colorful context the U.S. Supreme Court's signal 1896 decision sanctioning so-called separate but equal facilities. . . . Rich in family and community history and local lore,...

Horace Patterson's story follows his metamorphosis from baseball-playing youth to politically active and socially aware black minister. In this book of hope for the future, Patterson chronicles his escape from the cycle of poverty and violence through...

An essential story of understated courage, the lasting power of a name, and the battle to honor a pioneering legacy. On the eve of his second varsity football game for the Iowa State Cyclones, Jack Trice wrote in a letter, "The honor of my race, family...

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners...

Credible and important.--Kirkus Reviews Examining the issues that have united Blacks and Jews in the past and now separate them, two long-time friends and leading intellectuals try to restore the special relationship between the two groups in a...

Nineteenth-century stoneware by enslaved and free potters living in Edgefield, South Carolina, highlights the central role of Black artists in the region's long-standing pottery traditions This in-depth look at the remarkable alkaline-glazed stoneware...

Condoleezza Rice, one of the most powerful and controversial women in the world, has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer. New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller peels back the layers and presents a revelatory portrait of the...

Anniston, Alabama, is a small industrial city between Birmingham and Atlanta. In 1961, the city's potential for race-related violence was graphically revealed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a Freedom Riders bus. In response to that incident a few black...

A first-hand account of Angola's civil war.

A Quick Ting On: Grime Music is a brilliant look at the history, the present and the future of Grime Music. Franklyn Addo writes beautifully about this musical juggernaut that has taken over the UK in recent years.From the Bow estates to the charts, Addo...

Lawrence Campbell was an eyewitness who participated in a massive struggle to attain equality and justice nationwide and in Danville, Virginia in 1963. The year 1963 was a monumental year and a turning point in civil rights history. What transpired in...

Acasia Olson's The Book of Jo is the story of transgenerational trauma and the journey towards healing. At the center is Jo, a precocious little girl, adopted at infancy, into the loving arms of Opal, a God-fearing, older Black woman who can't have...

The Brave, Bold and Beautiful series was created to inspire, empower, enlighten and recount the personal histories of the forgotten, unknown and unacknowledged that live or have lived bravely, boldly and beautifully. As storytellers and keepers of the...

Oswald Augustus Grey was a Jamaican immigrant. He was 20 years old when he was executed and 19 when the crime for which he was convicted took place. To talk to people who lived in the city at the time, or to scour the nostalgia forums that proliferate...