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Edna Lewis : at the table with an American original
by Sara B. Franklin
"Edna Lewis (1916-2006) wrote some of America's most resonant, evocative, and significant cookbooks ever, including the now classic The Taste of Country Cooking. Lewis cooked and wrote first as a means to explore her memories of childhood on a farm in Freetown, Virginia, a community originally founded by freed black families. Later, she wrote to commemorate and document the seasonal richness of southern foodways ... She moved from the rural South to New York City, where she became a chef and a political activist, and eventually returned to the South. Her reputation as a trailblazer in the revival of regional cooking and as a progenitor of the farm-to-table movement only continues to burgeon."
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Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America
by Howard Bryant
I loved this book.... I looked forward to [it] more than any other in a long time, and Howard Bryant exceeded my great expectations. Kings and Pawns is brilliantly conceived and powerfully written. -- David Maraniss, author of Path Lit by LightningA path-breaking work of biography of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would forever be altered by the Cold War, and would explosively intersect before its most notorious weapon, the House Un-American Activities Committee -- from one of the best sports and culture writers working today. Kings and Pawns is the untold story of sports and fame, Black America and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred July 18, 1949 in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game and at the time was the most famous Black man in America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor -- himself once the most famous Black man in America. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson's life and contribute heavily to the destruction of Robeson's iconic reputation in the eyes of America.The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last, demagogic roar of McCarthyism, when a battered, defiant Robeson - prohibited from leaving the United States - faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting Robinson appeared in seven years earlier. These two moments would epitomize the ongoing Black American conflict between patriotism and protest. On the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson would represent two poles of a people pitted against itself by forces that demanded loyalty without equality in return - one man testifying in conflicted service to and the other in ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both.In a time of great division, with America in the midst of a new era of retrenchment and Black athletes again chilled into silence advocating for civil rights, the story of these two titans reverberates today within and beyond Black America. From the revival of government overreach to curb civil liberties to the Cold War-era rhetoric of the enemy within levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story of a moment that remains hauntingly present.
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The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas
by Carrie Gibson
For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the Americas, from the United States and the Caribbean to Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom. For the first time, their dramatic stories are gathered in one sweeping narrative that offers a message of inspiration in our own time.Among the emancipators are the millions whose stories will never be known. They lived the struggle. They were the great resistance. Thus does acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson conclude her magisterial chronicle of four centuries of effort by enslaved people in the western hemisphere to gain their freedom. Freedom is an idea, she writes, and the actions of the thousands who fought to escape slavery made clear that freedom had to be for everyone, otherwise it was a lie.The horrific enslavement by Europeans of twelve million Africans taken to the Americas has been widely written about, and important individual slave revolts have been recorded; but Gibson tells a larger story, portraying the multitude of freedom struggles across the entire hemisphere--from North America to the Caribbean to Brazil--as one long-running quest for freedom. From the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola, to the 18th-century Maroon Wars on Jamaica and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence, and thousands of smaller acts of defiance in between, Gibson vividly chronicles the continuum of resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil's decision in 1888, the institution of slavery itself.This was the most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known, and the way it was responded to shaped every nation in the Americas in meaningful ways. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery, historian Vincent Brown has written, we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world. With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a major contribution to the literature around slavery and freedom and, in our time, a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances.
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Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World
by Sudhir Hazareesingh
Historian Sudhir Hazareesingh recasts the story of slavery's end by showing that the enslaved themselves were at the center of the action--their voices, their resistance, and their extraordinary fight for freedom. Throughout, [his book] portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved and, wherever possible, in their own words. It highlights the power of collective action, stressing the role of maroon communities, conspiracies, insurrections, and spiritual movements, from Haiti and Brazil to Cuba, Mauritius, and the American South. These acts of resistance involved entire communities, with women often at the heart of the story as warriors, organizers, and agents of radical change--
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Black History Is for Everyone
by Brian Jones
A longtime educator explores how the study of Black history challenges our understanding of race, nation, and the stories we tell about who we are. Black history is under attack from powerful forces that seek to excise it from classrooms, libraries, and the popular imagination. Yet its opponents fail to understand a simple truth: the best education challenges our assumptions, helps us see larger forces at work, and gives us glimpses of alternate futures. In Black History Is for Everyone, Brian Jones offers a meditation on the power of Black history, using his own experiences as a lifelong learner and classroom teacher to question everything--from the radicalism of the American Revolution to the meaning of race and nation. With warmth and immersive storytelling, Jones encourages us to delve deeper into our collective history, explores how curiosity about our world is essential--and reminds us that with stakes so high, the effort is worth it.
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Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer
by Claude McKay
A collection of private correspondence from one of the Harlem Renaissance's brightest and most radical voices The Jamaican-born, queer author Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1919 poem If We Must Die expressed a revolutionary vision for militant Black protest art, while his novels, including Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom, described ordinary Black life in lyrical prose. Yet for all that McKay connected himself to Harlem, he was a restless world traveler who sought spiritual, artistic, and political sustenance in France, Spain, Moscow, and Morocco. Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb bring together two decades of McKay's never-before-published dispatches from the road with correspondents including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Max Eastman, and Louise Bryant. With wit, wisdom, insight, and sometimes irascible temper, McKay describes how he endured harassment from British authorities in London and worked alongside Leon Trotsky and Alexander Kerensky in Bolshevik Moscow. He reflects on Paris's Lost Generation, immerses himself in the Marseille dockers' noir subculture, and observes French colonialism in Morocco. Providing a new perspective on a unique figure of American modernism, this collection reveals McKay gossiping, cajoling, and confiding as he engages in spirited debates and challenges the political and artistic questions of the day.
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The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers
by Cheryl McKissack Daniel
A Scientific American Favorite Book of 2025 The riveting story of the McKissack family--the founders of the leading Black design and construction firm in the United States, from its beginnings in the mid-1800s to its thriving status today--in a moving celebration of resilience and innovation. Captured in his native West Africa and enslaved on American shores by a North Carolina plantation owner, Moses McKissack I began to build his way to emancipation right from the start. Becoming an enslaved craftsman, he picked up the trade his family would become famous for in the earliest years of the 19th century, passing his learnings down to his children and seeing them off to freedom after the Civil War. The family would settle in Tennessee, getting its bearings in the building trades despite rampant discrimination, establishing a foothold that now sees its latest generations working at the absolute peak of its industry. The family's fingerprints have been left all across the United States, spanning from Reconstruction to contemporary times, through projects like the Morris Memorial Building, Capers C.M.E. Church, John F. Kennedy International Airport, and Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field. Here, Cheryl McKissack Daniel, CEO and president of McKissack & McKissack, reveals the full fascinating story of her family. So much more than an exploration of architectural achievements, The Black Family Who Built America is also a compelling illustration of how history rhymes and reverberates, and a celebration of the human spirit's ability to overcome adversity and drive change. From Moses's humble beginnings to Cheryl's current role as a trailblazer and champion of diversity, the family's journey underscores the importance of perseverance, innovation, and strategic vision in shaping a legacy that continues to inspire and impact the construction industry.
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Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy
by Tre Johnson
A powerful read examining the lack of opportunity given to Black Americans due to structural racism, and how forgotten historical figures and the author's own family found a way to succeed despite the obstacles--Provided by publisher.
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Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times--Provided by publisher.
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Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System
by Brando Simeo Starkey
Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court--even more than the presidency or Congress--aligned with the enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution's Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Reconstruction Amendments--which sought to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights--converted the Constitution into a potent anti-caste document. But in the years since, the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendments to fulfill that promise. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation's founding conceit--that all men are created equal--real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness. Their Accomplices Wore Robes brings to life dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters--petitioners, attorneys, justices--to explain how America arrived at this point and how society might arrive somewhere better, even as today's federal courts lurch rightward. In this groundbreaking grand history, Brando Simeo Starkey reveals a troubling and dark aspect of American history--
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Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
by Marcus Rediker
A definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad's long-overlooked maritime origins, from a pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America now known as the Underground Railroad. Yet imagery of fugitives ushered clandestinely from safe house to safe house fails to capture the full breadth of these harrowing journeys: many escapes took place not by land but by sea. Deeply researched and grippingly told, Freedom Ship offers a groundbreaking new look into the secret world of stowaways and the vessels that carried them to freedom across the North and into Canada. Sprawling through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to Boston's harbors, these tales illuminate the little-known stories of freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea--among them the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, one of the Underground Railroad's most famous architects. Marcus Rediker, one of the leading scholars of maritime history, puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America's most significant historical moments.
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Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children
by Noliwe Rooks
A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author's family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice--
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Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
by Elaine Weiss
The acclaimed author of the stirring, definitive, and engrossing (NPR) The Woman's Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them. Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights--and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists--many of them women--trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, Mother of the Movement. In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.
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Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera
by Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan explores the flourishing of Black composers, performers, and critics of opera in America during the early twentieth century. Working outside mainstream opera houses, these artists fostered countercultural forms of expression that reimagined opera as a medium of Black aesthetic and political creativity.
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Harriet Tubman: Military Scout and Tenacious Visionary: From Her Roots in Ghana to Her Legacy on the Eastern Shore
by Jean Marie Wiesen
A comprehensive overview of Tubman's life and work, co-authored by one of her descendants, Rita Daniels. For all Harriet Tubman's accomplishments and the myriad books written about her, many gaps, errors, and misconceptions of her legendary life persist. As recognition and tributes to Tubman's remarkable contributions to American history and civil liberty continues to grow, the time is right for a new biography with the involvement of her family, who have been the caretakers and stewards of her legacy for generations.
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Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King
by Preston Lauterbach
... [Preston] Lauterbach examines the lives, music, legacies, and interactions with Elvis Presley of the four innovative Black artists who created a style that would come to be known as Rock 'n' Roll: Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur Big Boy Crudup, and mostly-unknown eccentric Beale Street guitarist Calvin Newborn. Along the way, he delves into the injustices of copyright theft and media segregation that resulted in Black artists living in poverty as white performers, managers, and producers reaped the lucrative rewards.--Provided by publisher.
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New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America's Second Civil Rights Movement
by Juan Williams
In this ... follow-up to Eyes on the Prize, ... Juan Williams turns his attention to the rise of a new 21st-century civil rights movement. More than a century of civil rights activism reached a mountaintop with the arrival of a Black man in the Oval Office. But hopes for a unified, post-racial America were deflated when Barack Obama's presidency met with furious opposition. A white, right-wing backlash was brewing, and a volcanic new movement--a second civil rights movement--began to erupt. ... Who are its heroes? Where is it headed? What fires, furies, and frustrations distinguish it from its predecessor? In the 20th century, Black activists and their white allies called for equal rights and an end to segregation. They appealed to the Declaration of Independence's defiant assertion that 'all men are created equal.' They prioritized legal battles in the courtroom and legislative victories in Congress. Today's movement is dealing with new realities--
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Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
by Jenn M. Jackson
A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like--from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue. Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.--Imani Perry, author of South to America FINALIST FOR THE PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us. Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers' lessons? A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements. Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders--from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde--Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.
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Frederick Douglass : prophet of freedom
by David W Blight
"The author of ""Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory"" chronicles the life of the escaped slave who became one of the greatest orators of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era."
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African American poetry : 250 years of struggle & song
by Kevin Young
A wide-ranging anthology of black poetry represents 250 famous and less-recognized poets from the colonial era to the present who used their powerful words to illuminate such issues as racism, slavery and the threatened African Diaspora identity.
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Koshersoul : the faith and food journey of an African American Jew
by Michael Twitty
In this thought-provoking and profound book, the James Beard award-winning author of The Cooking Gene explores the creation of African-Jewish cooking through memory, identity and food, offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them. 75,000 first printing.
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The cooking gene : a journey through African American culinary history in the Old South
by Michael Twitty
Sifting through stories, recipes, genetic tests and historical documents, a renowned culinary historian, in a memoir of Southern culinary tradition and food culture, traces his ancestry through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom, and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue and all Southern cuisine. 20,000 first printing.
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A black women's history of the United States
by Daina Ramey Berry
Two award-winning history professors and authors focus on the stories of African-American women slaves, civilians, religious leaders, artists, queer icons, activists and criminals in a celebration of black womanhood that demonstrates its indelible role in shaping America. (general history).
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In search of The color purple : the story of an American masterpiece
by Salamishah Tillet
A distinguished cultural critic blends literary history, biography and memoir in an exploration of Alice Walker's National Book Award-winning novel that examines its influence against a backdrop of the civil rights encroachments of the early 1980s. 25,000 first printing.
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