African American Studies

A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present....

A self-care guidebook full of activities for Black men everywhere pursuing joy, creating connections, confronting racism, and working through intergenerational trauma....

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history....

In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement....

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files....

There’s Always This Year is a poignant, personal reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America....

The Color of Water touches listeners of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son....

Dear Black Girls is a necessary and meaningful exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in America today—and a rallying cry to lift up women and girls everywhere....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

Prioritize your well-being with these 150 self-care exercises designed specifically to help Black women revitalize their outlook on life, improve their mental health, eliminate stress, and self-advocate....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

A heartfelt, and riveting biography of the short life of a talented young man who escapes the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets....

The classic, New York Times best-selling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America. Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups....

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's history.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison....

Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The story of Thurgood Marshall's defense - depsite death threats and KKK intimidation - of four Black youths falsely accused of rape....

One of the nation's preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics.

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship....

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum....

One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction....

An unapologetic exploration of the Black mental health crisis - and a comprehensive road map to getting the care you deserve in an unequal system....

“You cannot fix a problem you do not know you have.” So begins Emmanuel Acho in his essential guide to the truths Americans need to know to address the systemic racism that has recently electrified protests in all fifty states....

The most toxic racial arguments share one of five traits. They try to erase Black history, prioritize white victimhood, deny Black oppression, promote myths of Black inferiority, or rebrand racism as something else entirely....

Author and entrepreneur Dennis Kimbro combines bestselling author Napoleon Hill's law of success with his own vast knowledge of business....

Jay-Z: Made in America is the fruit of Michael Eric Dyson’s decade of teaching the work of one of the greatest poets this nation has produced, as gifted a wordsmith as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Rita Dove....

Ten years ago, Bell Hooks astonished readers/listeners with Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope - a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites listeners to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. Bell Hooks writes candidly about her own experiences.

In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator Bell Hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today. In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, Hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community.

Growing up in the Bronx, Joél Leon was taught that being soft, being vulnerable, could end your life. Shaped by a singular view of Black masculinity espoused by the media, by family and friends, and by society, he learned instead to care about the gold around his neck and the number of bills in his wallet. He absorbed the “facts” that white was always right and Black men were seen as threatening or great for comic relief but never worthy of the opening credits. It wasn’t until years later that Joél understood he didn’t have to be defined by these things.

When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual audiences frequently found the theory unsettling or provocative. Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in this audiobook remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in Hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement.

In Frontline Bodies, Nicolas Martin-Breteau argues that sports are not—and have never been—purely about entertainment for Black Americans. Instead, beginning in the 1890s during Reconstruction, Black Americans proactively used athletics as a tactic to fight racial oppression. Martin-Breteau considers the work of Edwin B. Henderson, a prominent Black physical educator, civil rights activist, and historian of Black sports.

In the United States, to be a Black American is to be a Black Christian. And there’s something to this assumption in that the vast majority of African Americans are Christian. However, in recent years a growing number of African Americans have said they claim no particular religious affiliation—they are Black "nones." And of these Black "nones," the most public and vocal are those who claim to be humanists. What does it mean to be a Black humanist? What do Black humanist believe, and what do they do? This slim volume answers these questions.

Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, explores the construct, culture, and material of the "meme" as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Mining archival and contemporary media Russell explores the impact of Blackness, Black life, and death on contemporary conceptions of viral culture, borne in the age of the internet.

The stories of thirteen Black Minor League baseball players during the post-Jackie Robinson era, from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, who were figuratively and literally left behind even as both baseball and the country claimed a newfound racial progressiveness.

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."

Thirty years have passed since Cornel West's book Race Matters rose to the top of the bestseller lists in 1993. Yet his book remains as relevant as ever to American culture-even more so, if one considers its influence on contemporary racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, prison justice, and the fight for police reform. Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope looks back to the original 1993 text and forward into the future of racial understanding and healing in our current century.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.

Through cutting social analysis, personal stories, and need-to-know advice, Dear Bi Men reclaims bi+ visibility in a culture of erasure—and unapologetically centers Blackness in a practical and deeply researched guide to navigating life, work, and relationships as a Black bi+ man.

In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada in their relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons, policing and borders, as well as through purported care institutions such as hospitals and social work.

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.