Showing titles in Black & African American

Written in 1860 in the language of the day by William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom tells the story of a husband and wife's plight to escape slavery in 1848 Georgia. Unlike many slaves who escaped in the dead of night chased by slave hunters and bloodhounds, the Crafts traveled in first-class trains, dined with a steamboat captain, and stayed in the best hotels during their escape to Philadelphia and freedom. Ellen, who was nearly white, disguised herself as a young male cotton planter traveling with his slave, William.

History of the Black Man was published in 1921, by African American preacher Joseph Julius Jackson, a man who passionately believed that, without access to a knowledge of where a people came from, and an understanding of the factual history of a race, there can be no pride, no reason to hold your head high. This thoroughly researched volume was written to supply that knowledge and understanding.

In this collection of essays, renowned social-justice advocate Tim Wise confronts racism in contemporary America. Seen through the lens of major flashpoints during the Obama and Trump years, Dispatches from the Race War faces the consequences of white supremacy in all its forms. This includes a discussion of the bigoted undertones of the Tea Party’s backlash, the killing of Trayvon Martin, current-day anti-immigrant hysteria, the rise of openly avowed white nationalism, the violent policing of African Americans, and more.

Abolitionism was the movement that strove to end slavery in the United States. The abolitionists saw slavery as a stain and an affliction on the United States and made it their goal to eradicate slave ownership. Abolitionists produced anti-slavery literature, sent petitions to Congress, and ran for political office.

One of the first studies of the organization, life, and meaning of the Nation of Islam and, by extension, all Black Nationalist movements, this classic work dispels the still-common conception that the movement functioned primarily for political purposes. By observing the daily life of its members, Essien-Udom demonstrates that the Nation of Islam served primarily as a means for poor urban Blacks to attain a national identity, a sense of ethnic consciousness, and empowerment in a society that denied them these privileges.

The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1903 as a collection of essays from W.E.B. Du Bois, an African-American sociologist who wrote frequently about his experiences as a Black man for magazines and other publications. This book is comprised of 14 essays, with Du Bois’s overall message being that Black people were equally worthy of the rights of White people: to vote, to receive a good quality education, and to be treated justly.

Black Picket Fences is a stark, moving, and candid look at a section of America that is too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the Black middle class. The result of living for three years in "Groveland", a Black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy has written a book that explores both the advantages and the boundaries that exist for members of the Black middle class.

First published in 1961, John Hope Franklin’s revelatory study of the Reconstruction Era is a landmark work of history, exploring the role of former slaves and dispelling longstanding popular myths about corruption and Radical rule. Looking past dubious scholarship that had previously dominated the narrative, Franklin combines astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era.

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment.

"Black people are not dark-skinned white people," says advertising visionary Tom Burrell. In fact, they are much more. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of "No way!" At this...

The bloodiest week New Orleans has known since the massacre of the Italians in 1892 was ushered in Monday, July 24 by the inexcusable and unprovoked assault upon two colored men by police officers of New Orleans.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass covers the life of the prominent abolitionist during and after the Civil War. Here, Douglass provides a fuller account of his escape from slavery and the underground railway to freedom. It includes his recollections of presidents Garfield and Lincoln, Johnson and Garfield, and an account of his service as Marshall of the District of Columbia.

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification.

This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people - and explain why and how society needs to collectively do more to combat its pernicious effects.

In 1950, before Montgomery, Alabama, knew Martin Luther King Jr., before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a White passenger, before the city's famous bus boycott, a Negro man named Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by a White police officer in a confrontation after he tried to board a city bus. Thomas Gray, who had played football with Hilliard when they were kids, was outraged by the unjustifiable shooting. Gray protested, eventually staging a major downtown march to register voters and standing up to police brutality.

Booker T. Washington's essay "The Awakening of the Negro" was published in the September 1896 issue of The Atlantic. It is a semi-autobiographical essay that sets forth Washington’s vision of uplifting his people. He relates how his work began at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, in a small shanty and church without a dollar’s worth of property. The spirit of work and of industrial thrift, with aid from the state and generosity from the North, enabled them to develop an institution of 800 students from 19 states.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was one of the most prominent leaders in advancing African American civil rights. He points out that those who are freed cannot be members of society because they are not given the same opportunities. Washington concludes the book with five principles that will aid African Americans in their fight to have equal rights and opportunities.

"As a narrator, the reverence and tenderness Dyson communicates in his letters--addressed to victims of racist violence Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney--invoke the experience of listening in on a holy...

In 1852, Frederick Douglass, former slave and, by then, a leading figure in the abolitionist movement was asked by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Association to address the group for their July 4th celebration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. The speech caused an immediate sensation and swiftly became a seminal rallying cry of the abolitionist movement in America. The audience in Rochester included none other than President Millard Fillmore.

The truth about slavery in America from a former slave, Fredrick Douglass. Mr. Douglass was one of the most articulate Americans of his era. There was no such person as a happy slave and black lives mattered only to abolitionists and the slaves themselves.