General African American Studies

First published in 1990, Michele Wallace's Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace's considerations of the black experience in America include recollections of her early life in Harlem; a look at the...

The classic work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice, now with a new foreword by Michelle AlexanderIn Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue...

A "rich hybrid of memoir and history" (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion "Bennett...transport[s] us back to...

Traveling throughout the South during the 1950s was hazardous for African Americans. There were precious few hotels and restaurants that opened their doors to minorities, and fewer still had accommodations above the bare minimum, to say nothing of the...

The New York Times bestselling author of Be the Bridge calls people of faith to confront the historical inequities that still exist in so many American institutions--from our legal system and media to our schools and churches--and offers a path toward a...

A short introduction to Black Humanism: its history, its present, and the rich cultural sensibilities that infuse it 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...

A New York Times Editors' Pick"Magnificent.... A uniquely intimate history of Black liberation." - Los Angeles TimesThe long overdue story of the Shakurs, persistent fighters in the U.S. struggle for racial justice, and one of the most prominent,...

Twelve Years a Slave, a chronicle of the amazing ordeal of a free African-American kidnapped in the north, and impressed into slavery in Louisiana, is one of the most compelling and detailed slave narratives in existence. The text and story were...