General History

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...

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 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...

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...

A kaleidoscopic narrative history of 1963, the pivotal moment in America's long civil rights movement--the year of the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and the assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy...

A clear, critical, accessible, and ultimately hopeful discovery voyage through the seas of Du Bois's language and ideas.Offering a vision both hopeful and thoughtful, Reading Du Bois is an Afrocentric reexamination of the work of one of the most...

The groundbreaking story of the BBC's first Black woman broadcaster--finally brought to light.Una Marson was unstoppable--a poet whose words lit up hearts, a broadcaster who made history in 1941 as the first Black woman on the BBC, and an activist who...

Taking an important step toward a more inclusive and truthful understanding of Cape Cod's past, this book uncovers and reflects upon Cape Cod's role in the institution of slavery. Through this work of historical, creative nonfiction that also includes a...