Cultural Literature

In the late 1920s and '30s Lincoln Perry, aka Stepin Fetchit, was both renowned and reviled for his surrealistic portrayals of the era's most popular comic stereotype-the lazy, shiftless Negro. Perry was hailed by critic Robert Benchley as "the best...

Civil rights leader and legislator Lloyd A. Barbee frequently signed his correspondence with "Justice for All," a phrase that embodied his life's work of fighting for equality and fairness. An attorney most remembered for the landmark case that...

2000 marks the centenary of Lift Every Voice and Sing, James Weldon Johnson's most famous lyric, which is now embraced as the Negro National Anthem. In celebration, this Penguin original collects all the poems from Johnson's published works--Fifty Years...

"[A] nuanced, Edith Wharton-style treatment of the upper reaches of black society...[Little] is an arbiter of that insular world." --The Washington Post Abra Lewis Dixon is the envy of the fashionable, professional women of her well-heeled social circle...

We can heal our communities--one friendship at a time. Many of us want to do something to improve race relations, but we don't know where to start or even if we can make a difference. In Life-Changing Cross-Cultural Friendships, beloved authors and good...

Springfield became the capital of Illinois due in large part to Abraham Lincoln--lawyer, politician, and president. Lincoln lived in Springfield from 1837 to 1861, and during the decade after his departure, the African American population in the city...

A New York Times BestsellerIn Every Little Step, Bobby Brown tells the full story of his life and sets the record straight, particularly about his relationship with Whitney Houston.Bobby Brown has been one of the most compelling American artists of the...

A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping and exquisite look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy. Dipuo grew up...

In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven year old Sudanese boy, living in a small village with his parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. But as Sudan's civil war moved closer--with the Islamic government seizing tribal lands for water, oil, and other...

The 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which every aspect of life in the United States was and is shaped by the existence of slavery. Black Ghost of Empire focuses on emancipation and how this opportunity to make right further codified the racial caste...