Essential Reads

A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize-winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South...

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. "As we go about our daily...

The life story of African-American revolutionary Shakur, previously known as JoAnne Chesimard. A compelling tale of the impact of white racism on a sensitive and powerful young black woman. -- Library Journal

"Medical Apartheid" is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans, from the era of slavery to today. Washington details the ways both slaves and freedmen have been used in hospitals for experiments conducted...

The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors is a collection of essays by Dr. Francis Cress Welsing, a physician specializing in general and child psychiatry, focusing on the global system of White supremacy and strategies for coping with racism in modern...

Dr. Anderson's first book is a classic. It tracks slavery and Jim Crow public policies that used black labor to construct a superpower nation. It details how black people were socially engineered into the lowest level of a real life Monopoly game, which...

PowerNomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America is a five-year plan to make Black America a prosperous and empowered race that is self-sufficient and competitive as a group by the year 2005. In this book, Dr. Anderson obliterates the myths and...

With a Foreword by Edwidge Danticat and an Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring...

ONE OF TIME'S TEN MOST IMPORTANT NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY   In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the...

Review: “I can’t praise this book enough! I kept shaking my head over its power.” Ishmael Reed “Comprehensive and convincing . . . a big boost to black cultural history.” Publishers Weekly "They Came Before Columbus reveals...

A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.  Dan Freeman, the "spook...

A transformative journey of physical and ancestral healing from a renowned herbalist, natural health expert, and dedicated healer of women's bodies and women's souls "Just when I thought I was all alone, I found myself walking with a group of...

How wonderful it is to [be] taught by a free teacher, a spiritual teacher, a member of our family who truly loves the family, an architect of tranforming processes, a defender of African people, a beacon, a Son of Africa, a divine spirit manisfesting our...

"His life informed us, his dreams sustain us yet."* On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial looking out over thousands of troubled Americans who had gathered in the name of civil rights and uttered his now famous...