Cultural Literature

This unforgettable and "beautifully written" (The Seattle Times) memoir explores first love, unthinkable loss, and the toll of grief. Kareem Rosser and Lee Lee Jones were young, beautiful, and deeply in love. Their love was a real-world romance that...

A moving and inspiring memoir from a former Obama White House staffer, about his rural Maryland family's untold history, the merger of three churches--one Black, two white--and how a radical embrace of community became their salvation, and his "A moving...

The posthumous memoir of Rev. James Lawson Jr., peer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., mentor to Congressman John Lewis and the Freedom Riders, and a principal architect of a nonviolent resistance movement that changed the world. "This book is a gift to be...

A profound meditation on hip hop's transformative power, In the Hour of Chaos takes us deep into the mind of the genre's most unabashed revolutionary. This book is not an autobiography. It's not a manifesto. It's a razor-sharp investigation into hip...

A look at the efforts of two generations of Black Philadelphians to turn the City of Brotherly Love into a place of promise and opportunity for all, reissued with a new preface that continues the story of civil rights activism in Philadelphia up to the...

A powerful exploration of self-resilience, family, and community from activist and prison abolitionist Keeonna Harris.Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an...

A long-forgotten Black abolitionist who liberated captive workers by the wagonload, brilliantly satirized slaveholders, and gave the underground railroad its name. Thomas Smallwood was a shoemaker by day and an organizer of mass escapes from slavery by...

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women's experiences across the African diaspora Growing up in World War II-era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929-2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer,...

A leading sociologist's groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children's futures. Between 1970 and 2020, the United States experienced a dramatic...

In a country where systemic racism is embedded in every institution, and in a city like Milwaukee-known for its segregation, surveillance, and high incarceration rates of Black men-Craig Brown managed to do the improbable: he never caught a case.Never...

A. J. Cade's Death or Victory offers the first in-depth history of the Louisiana Native Guards, pioneering African American regiments within the Union army. Originating as a division of the New Orleans Home Guards in May 1861, the Native Guards consisted...