Showing results for "The Story" in African American Studies

This national best-seller chronicles the true story of two brothers coming of age in the Henry Horner public housing complex in Chicago. Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers are 11 and nine years old when the story begins in the summer of 1987. Living with their mother and six siblings, they struggle against grinding poverty, gun violence, gang influences, overzealous police officers, and overburdened and neglectful bureaucracies. Immersed in their lives for two years, Kotlowitz brings us this classic rendering of growing up poor in America’s cities.

Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a "free" person to the 2013 uproar over an Ohio school that banned Afro puffs, the issues surrounding Black hair continue to linger as we move through the 21stst century.

A queer Black feminist debunks the myth of rainbow solidarity, repositioning Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ people at the forefront of queer pasts, presents, and futures Your favorite Black queer studies professor Kaila Adia Story says the rainbow ain’t never been enough in this introduction to the...

Seen around the world, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute on the 1968 Olympic podium sparked controversy and career fallout. Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most iconic images of Olympic history and the Black Power movement. Here is the remarkable story of one of the men behind the salute, lifelong activist John Carlos.

This psychologist is frustrated. In the final stretch of his doctoral internship, Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter had just one more milestone to complete—the diversity project—where candidates insert themselves into a situation in which they’d experience what it’s like to be a minority...

Seen around the world, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute on the 1968 Olympic podium sparked controversy and career fallout. Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most iconic images of Olympic history and the Black Power movement. Here is the remarkable story of one of the men behind the salute, lifelong activist, John Carlos.

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country's founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

A searing tribute of sisterhood and family, profound love and loss from the acclaimed author of The World According to Fannie Davis. In Love, Rita Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister Rita, who knew Bridgett before she knew herself. Just four years apart in age, as the...

An important book of epic scope on America’s first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for change The civil war brought to a climax the country’s bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery’s denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and...

Set against the backdrop of Jim Crow, Night Train to Nashville takes readers behind the curtain of one of music's greatest untold stories during the era of segregation and Civil Rights. In another time and place, E. Gab Blackman and William Sousa "Sou" Bridgeforth might have been as close as...

Why have White supremacists and Black activists been so focused on Black mobility? From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought for over a century to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of "separate but equal" involved trains and buses, Mia Bay went back to the sources with some basic questions: How did travel segregation begin?

As the first Black woman to anchor the Boston-area evening news, Liz Walker found herself in an industry that defined the neighborhood of Roxbury largely by violence. But when she became a pastor there, Walker grew close to households marked not only by trauma but by courage—including the family of Cory Johnson, a young father who was murdered. In the wake of their worst nightmare, the family reached out for help.

Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers 50 years (1920-1970) of high school football history.

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and Black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within 24 hours of the discovery of the murder, would be inextricably linked in the nation's imagination to an exceptionally brutal, modern-day lynching. In this superbly written examination of the murder and its aftermath, award-winning journalist Joyce King brings us on a journey that begins at the crime scene.

This program is read by the author. From one of the most lyrically gifted, socially conscious rappers of the past twenty years, Vibrate Higher is a firsthand account of hip-hop as a political force Before Talib Kweli became a world-renowned hip hop artist, he was a Brooklyn kid who liked to cut...

#SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as "the best place to buy menthols".

Uplifting and occasionally heartbreaking stories of love from the time of slavery in the American south.

Winner of the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book A Best Book of the Year from TIME, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Washington Independent Review of Books, and more! The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective...