Cultural Literature

Here is the black Chicago family album, of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and "goin' to Chicago" to find the American Dream.The story of black Chicago is so rich that few know it all. It began long before the city itself. Wells, the...

Three years and 29 days prior to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, a man branded "zealot", "fanatic" and "traitor" was hanged. John Brown and his band of 21 followersseized the armory at Harper's Ferry to obtain weapons, arm the slaves, and through...

In 1959, twenty-nine-year-old Berry Gordy, who had already given up on his dream to be a champion boxer, borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family and started a record company. A run-down bungalow sandwiched between a funeral home and a beauty shop...

"An astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture." -The New York Times Book ReviewIn the Obama era, as Americans confront the enduring significance of race and heritage, this...

The Guitar Collection: Rhythm & Blues contains 65 key R&B songs from past greats such as Sam Cooke, Al Green, and James Brown, all the way up to instant classics by contemporary artists like Cee Lo Green, Bruno Mars, and Alicia Keys. Every book in The...

Discover the simple, revolutionary practice behind the against-the-odds success story of Dr. Myron L. Rolle: NFL football player, Rhodes Scholar, and neurosurgery resident at Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Myron L. Rolle has led a remarkable...

In the late 1920s and '30s Lincoln Perry, aka Stepin Fetchit, was both renowned and reviled for his surrealistic portrayals of the era's most popular comic stereotype-the lazy, shiftless Negro. Perry was hailed by critic Robert Benchley as "the best...

Civil rights leader and legislator Lloyd A. Barbee frequently signed his correspondence with "Justice for All," a phrase that embodied his life's work of fighting for equality and fairness. An attorney most remembered for the landmark case that...

2000 marks the centenary of Lift Every Voice and Sing, James Weldon Johnson's most famous lyric, which is now embraced as the Negro National Anthem. In celebration, this Penguin original collects all the poems from Johnson's published works--Fifty Years...

"[A] nuanced, Edith Wharton-style treatment of the upper reaches of black society...[Little] is an arbiter of that insular world." --The Washington Post Abra Lewis Dixon is the envy of the fashionable, professional women of her well-heeled social circle...

We can heal our communities--one friendship at a time. Many of us want to do something to improve race relations, but we don't know where to start or even if we can make a difference. In Life-Changing Cross-Cultural Friendships, beloved authors and good...