General History

Booker T. Washington has long held an ambiguous position in the pantheon of black leadership. Lauded by some in his own lifetime as a black George Washington, he was also derided by others as a Benedict Arnold. In "The Education of Booker T. Washington,"...

An intimate view of the triumphs and challenges experienced by Black officers in the twentieth century.Rise to Command is a social history told in the words of seventeen Black military officers who grew up in the Jim Crow era and served in the US...

Founded in 1975, the non-partisan National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) played a critical role in the Black women's liberation movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Chicago-based organization's Black humanist feminism powered a...

In the nation's so-called heartland, racism is sometimes subtler than in other parts of the country but just as insidious. When Black communities across America went up in flames in the 1960s, Midwest cities, where racial inequity was endemic, were among...

New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures. One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city monument came in...

A moving and humane portrait of the abolitionist revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led Haiti's fight for independence from French colonial rule "My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery," declared Jean-Jacques Dessalines as he...

Reveals the role of amateur Black football and basketball in Virginia before integration as a form of resistance to white supremacy In Playing for Power, Marvin T. Chiles offers a fascinating account of amateur sports in Jim Crow Virginia, revealing how,...

After a decade restoring the Camptown Cemetery in Brenham, Texas, the state's oldest established Black graveyard, Charles Swenson researched the names he found there, developing a narrative of the freedom colony. The cemetery becomes not just a place...

A vibrant, deeply researched biography of A'Lelia Walker--daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance--written by her great-granddaughter. Dubbed the "joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s" by poet Langston Hughes,...

After the Civil War, Black landownership in Fairfax County increased by leaps and bounds. By the 1870s, retired Union officers were purchasing land that they sold to African Americans like Joshua Ball, Joshua Pearson, Robert Bradley and John Coates...

Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America's tax regimes. American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically...

A vivid firsthand record of the stain of white supremacy and the outspoken resistance of Black and white Americans who envisioned a better, more just nation W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in...

By challenging the rules of enslavement and, later, pushing the boundaries of free citizenship in North Carolina, Lunsford Lane (1803-79) became a folk hero to many enslaved Southerners, as well as a generation of abolitionists. Author of a unique "slave...

How Black Protestants in Chicago created Ethiopianism, a transnational religious movement against Western imperialism City of Black Souls uncovers the history of how, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Black Protestants in Chicago...

The new book from the New York Times bestselling author of The Three Mothers. In Erased, Anna Malaika Tubbs recovers all that American patriarchy has tried to destroy. Patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions worldwide, but the...