African American Studies

As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done...

Discover a Better Standard of ExcellenceYou're not good enough. How many of us internalize this belief before we even reach adulthood? How many of us feel unworthy and unable to live up to what seem like impossible-yet-completely-arbitrary standards?...

A kaleidoscopic account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the...

Cities are nothing without the streets--the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street, Jessica D. Klanderud documents the...

Black women are the single most religious demographic in the United States, yet they are among the poorest, least educated, and least healthy groups in the nation. Drawing on the author's own past experience as an evangelical minister and her present...

The personal account of one man's groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in the countless oft-overlooked former slave dwellings that still stand across the country, the fascinating history behind those sites, and how he has used the experiences to...

A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it's too late--from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this...

Families trapped in poverty and systemic injustices. Children denied civil rights because of race. A nation with immense potential for freedom spiraling into prejudice, violence, and hate. The country Frederick Douglass knew over one-hundred years ago...

A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa's Greenwood district, or "Black Wall Street," that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood,...

African Americans' unique encounter with the Bible has shaped centuries of spirituality and the social engagement of a whole continent. In The Bible and African Americans, highly respected biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush outlines different ways African...

The Souls of Black Folk is a founding text of the US civil rights movement, an inspiring work of literature and advocacy by a young man who drew on his own experience as a child in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a teacher in the hills of Tennessee, a...

What is the essence of black dance in America? To answer that question, Brenda Dixon Gottschild maps an unorthodox 'geography', the geography of the black dancing body, to show the central place black dance has in American culture. From the feet to the...