African American Studies

An "unsparing, erudite, and incisive" (Jelani Cobb) reframing of the past and present of Black resistance--both nonviolent and violent--to white supremacy Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther...

The long-awaited autobiography from Georgetown University's legendary coach, whose life on and off the basketball court threw America's unresolved struggle with racial justice into sharp relief. John Thompson was never just a basketball coach and I Came...

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent...

New York Times Best Seller A Skimm Reads Pick From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today--written as a letter to a friend. A few years ago,...

White fear has shaped our democracy and society from the beginning--and today, it's more intense and visible than ever. To neutralize it, we must first understand it. White fear is not new. It enabled the rise of Donald Trump. It's behind the recent...

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X--all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates,...

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his...

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten...

An incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as primitive, in order...

Of the books authored by Martin R. Delany (1812-1885), "The Origin of Races and Color" is perhaps the most obscure. Out-of-print until now, it has been available to the public only through select libraries. At the time of its publication in 1879, this...

A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the "star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful" (NPR). Brilliant...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - One of today's most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost...