Cultural Literature

In the nation's so-called heartland, racism is sometimes subtler than in other parts of the country but just as insidious. When Black communities across America went up in flames in the 1960s, Midwest cities, where racial inequity was endemic, were among...

A vivid firsthand record of the struggle for legal equality and dignity in the face of segregation and racial terror from 1919 to 1976 W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in American life. The powerful...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE - PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST - ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" - NOW AN HBO...

New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures. One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city monument came in...

The Black Pack: Comedy, Race & Resistance is the first book to chronicle the untold history behind the iconic collaborations between a legendary group of comedians--Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall--who...

Most know Marvelous MarvinHagler from his epic battles against Thomas Hearns and John Mugabi and hiscontroversial split-decision loss to Sugar Ray Leonard. But it is his escapefrom riot-torn Newark in the late 1960s, the unbreakable bond he built with...

A moving and humane portrait of the abolitionist revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led Haiti's fight for independence from French colonial rule "My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery," declared Jean-Jacques Dessalines as he...

Reveals the role of amateur Black football and basketball in Virginia before integration as a form of resistance to white supremacy In Playing for Power, Marvin T. Chiles offers a fascinating account of amateur sports in Jim Crow Virginia, revealing how,...

After a decade restoring the Camptown Cemetery in Brenham, Texas, the state's oldest established Black graveyard, Charles Swenson researched the names he found there, developing a narrative of the freedom colony. The cemetery becomes not just a place...

At a time when America faces escalating racial tensions, the re-emergence of white nationalist movements, and growing threats to democracy, Ralph Remington's Penetrating Whiteness is an urgently needed clarion call. This powerful and timely collection of...

For readers of Kiese Laymon's Heavy and Hanif Abdurraqib's A Little Devil in America, a beautiful, painful, and soaring tribute to everything that Black men are and can be Growing up in the Bronx, Jo?l Leon was taught that being soft, being vulnerable,...

A groundbreaking look at how Black visionaries--from Wall Street to Lagos and beyond--are reimagining capitalism to benefit the needs of Black people and, ultimately, everyone. To many, the term "Black Capitalists" is oxymoronic. Black people were the...

A vibrant, deeply researched biography of A'Lelia Walker--daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance--written by her great-granddaughter. Dubbed the "joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s" by poet Langston Hughes,...