Cultural Literature

The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country in the world and every year nearly 700,000 prisoners get released back into society, the largest percentage of them being black males. "Getting Out & Staying Out" is a short,...

In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to protest racial discrimination, low wages, and the marginalization of their dignity. The movement began...

Born to a formerly enslaved mother and a white planter father, P. B. S. Pinchback (1837-1921) became the first African American governor in the United States. His tenure as governor of Louisiana was brief--a mere thirty-five days--but he remains one of...

2019 Over the Rainbow Booklist Selection for Nonfiction.Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences...

In the twentieth century, African Americans not only helped make popular music the soundtrack of the American experience, they advanced American music as one of the preeminent shapers of the world's popular culture. Vast numbers of black American...

Are the stars of the Civil Rights firmament yesterday's news? In Living Black History scholar and activist Manning Marable offers a resounding "No!" with a fresh and personal look at the enduring legacy of such well-known figures as Malcolm X, Martin...

A tale of revolt aboard a nineteenth-century slave ship and the story of the slaves' heroic leader, Madison Washington.

This is the story of the drive to free the American South from the shackles of legally sanctioned racial segregation. In a lively and compact narrative, John Salmond sets the scene with the first stirrings of revolt prompted by the New Deal and the...

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in A Theory of Justice but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered...

Without credentials or connections, community college student and advocate Deesha Dyer navigated her imposter syndrome, landing one of the most exclusive positions in the White House. Michelle Obama calls Undiplomatic "smart, funny, and...

The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the...

Building Beloved Communities traces the life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith (b. 1935), an iconoclastic black minister who has channeled his civil rights work into establishing multi-racial churches in four cities--Buffalo, NY; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO;...