Cultural Literature

If you let a black girl loose in a library, you may not recognize the woman who emerges. --from Miss ChloeToni Morrison, born Chloe A Wofford, was a towering figure in the world of literature when she entered A.J. Verdelle's life. Their literary...

DC Represent!There's a party over here, there's a party over there! In go-go the party never stops, and neither does the beat. The bands, the stars, the clubs, the spots, the sweat, the late nights and the passion are the sound of the city--all...

A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the "worthy and necessary" (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the...

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation's first HBCUs In The Devil's Half Acre, New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of...

An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love As heard on NPR's Fresh Air A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our...

Ernest Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and '60s: Martin Luther King, Jr., riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Till's uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at his nephew's killer;...

Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering...

A contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy. The Black Technical Object aims at introducing the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis--a system of racism...

Never one to mince words, Effa Manley once wrote a letter to sportswriter Art Carter, saying that she hoped they could meet soon because "I would like to tell you a lot of things you should know about baseball." From 1936 to 1948, Manley ran the Negro...

He was a son of Africa who became father to a nation and, for billions of people around the world, a beacon of hope, courage, and perseverance in the face of opposition. Now, acclaimed poet Maya Angelou honors the life and remarkable soul of Nelson...

In this comprehensive book, published to coincide with a groundbreaking Tate exhibition, leading scholars examine how "the Black Atlantic," a key concept in post-colonial studies coined by British academic Paul Gilroy in 1993, applies to art, and in...

These angry essays show how the massive New Afrikan uprisings of the 1960s were answered by the white ruling class: with the destruction of New Afrikan communities coast to coast, the decimation of the New Afrikan working class, the rise of the prison...