Cultural Literature

An in-depth look at the rising American generation entering the Black professional class Despite their diversity, Black Americans have long been studied as a uniformly disadvantaged group. Drawing from a representative sample of over a thousand Black...

Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven...

The making of a culture of Black male respectability at Morehouse that underlines conservative notions of gender and class--by a former Spelman student who was once "Miss Morehouse." How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black...

An inspirational trove of film posters and ephemera, photographs, artwork and more from the collection of Spike Lee For nearly four decades, Spike Lee has made movies that demand our attention. His extensive filmography reflects an unflinching critique...

An exploration of the personal and artistic connections between two icons of twentieth-century art Keith Haring (1958-1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) changed the art world of the 1980s through their idiosyncratic imagery, radical ideas, and...

Born into slavery, Rebecca Crumpler became the first Black female physician in America. Stuntwoman Bessie Coleman was the first Black person in the world to obtain a pilot's license. The work of Harlem Renaissance sculptor Selma Burke can be found on the...

"The West will begin to understand Africa when it realizes it's not talking to a child--it's talking to its mother." So writes Jeff Pearce in the introduction to his fascinating, groundbreaking work, The Gifts of Africa: How a Continent and Its People...

For those wondering how Bill Clinton could pardon white-collar fugitive Marc Rich but not Native American leader Leonard Peltier, important clues can be found in this classic study of the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). Agents of...

Gabrielle Civil mines black dreams and black time to reveal a vibrant archive of black feminist creative expressions.Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the déjà vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech,...

Ending the horrors of police violence requires addressing economic inequality In the wake of the mass protests following the police murder of George Floyd nearly every major consumer brand had proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad...

The untold story of the world's most controversial album---a surreal tale of secret recordings, the Wu-Tang Clan, baffled customs agents, the world's most hallowed art institutions, and a villain of comic book proportions: Martin Shkreli. In 2007, the...

A raw, uplifting story from one of the most important hidden figures in track and field history. When Pauline Davis first began to run, it wasn't with any thought of future Olympic glory. A product of the poor neighborhood of Bain Town in The Bahamas,...