History

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...

What is beauty, and what is its political function? In what ways might it help undermine white supremacy and cultivate a more democratic political culture? Democracy and Beauty shines a light on W. E. B. Du Bois's attempts to answer these questions...

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...