Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Illinois

From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier

A Russian soldier-peasant escapes from a German prison camp. Recaptured in the uniform of a dead spy, he is sentenced to death.

Cathy Williams

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The Story of AIDS and Black America

As we enter the twenty-first century, AIDS in America has become primarily a black disease. African Americans now constitute 50 percent of all new HIV cases, and AIDS is one of the top causes of death in young black men and women. The story of how this came to pass reaches across half a century, from the Great Migration north to the boom of the postwar era and the subsequent urban decay, the advent of heroin and crack, and the rise of the new South. In The Secret Epidemic, Jacob Levenson tells this story through the experiences of the people at its center. Mindy Fullilove, one of the first black researchers to investigate the roots of the epidemic, leads us from San Francisco to the early appearance of the disease in Harlem and the South Bronx. Desiree Rushing must reconcile her crack addiction and HIV infection with the fate of her city, family, and the black church. Mario Cooper is a gay son of the black elite who becomes infected, works to mobilize the Congressional Black Caucus and the Clinton White House to respond to the epidemic, and eventually confronts the boundaries of American race politics. And David deShazo is a white social worker thrust into a hidden, rural black world in the heart of the American South, where he struggles to prevent the spreading epidemic and help two infected black sisters survive with the disease. Interweaving personal stories and national policy, the legacy of discrimination and the battle for civil rights, sexuality and the role of the black church, this is a significant book for our time----a portrait of a devastating epidemic and an examination of our changing understanding of race in America.

The Secret Epidemic

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

History

A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire

The grandson of slaves, born into poverty in 1892 in the Deep South, A. G. Gaston died more than a century later with a fortune worth well over $130 million and a business empire spanning communications, real estate, and insurance. Gaston was, by any measure, a heroic figure whose wealth and influence bore comparison to J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Here, for the first time, is the story of the life of this extraordinary pioneer, told by his niece and grandniece, the award-winning television journalist Carol Jenkins and her daughter Elizabeth Gardner Hines.

Born at a time when the bitter legacy of slavery and Reconstruction still poisoned the lives of black Americans, Gaston was determined to make a difference for himself and his people. His first job, after serving in the celebrated all-black regiment during World War I, bound him to the near-slavery of an Alabama coal mine--but even here Gaston saw not only hope but opportunity. He launched a business selling lunches to fellow miners, soon established a rudimentary bank--and from then on there was no stopping him. A kind of black Horatio Alger, Gaston let a single, powerful question be his guide: What do our people need now? His success flowed from an uncanny genius for knowing the answer.

Combining rich family lore with a deep knowledge of American social and economic history, Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Hines unfold Gaston's success story against the backdrop of a century of crushing racial hatred and bigotry. Gaston not only survived the hardships of being black during the Depression, he flourished, and by the 1950s he was ruling a Birmingham-based business empire. When the movement for civil rights swept through the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gaston provided critical financial support to many activists.

At the time of his death in 1996, A. G. Gaston was one of the wealthiest black men in America, if not the wealthiest. But his legacy extended far beyond the monetary. He was a man who had proved it was possible to overcome staggering odds and make a place for himself as a leader, a captain of industry, and a far-sighted philanthropist. Writing with grace and power, Jenkins and Hines bring their distinguished ancestor fully to life in the pages of this book. Black Titan is the story of a man who created his own future--and in the process, blazed a future for all black businesspeople in America.

Black Titan

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#hardcover #firstedition #africanamericanwomen #autobiography 

A Writer's Activism

America's beloved author of The Color Purplewrites here about her life as an activist, in a book rich in belief in the world as savable, if only we will act on our beliefs. Here are a superb writer's thoughts on politics, culture, feminism, race, religion, raising a daughter, writing and living.

Anything We Love Can Be Saved

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The Silencing of Ruby McCollum 

The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher

#hardcover #firstedition #africanamerican #history 

Or Does It Explodes?

Harlem 

Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930

It was W.E.B. DuBois who paved the way with his essays and his magazine The Crisis, but the Harlem Renaissance was mostly a literary and intellectual movement whose best known figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer.nbsp;nbsp;Their work ranged from sonnets to modernist verse to jazz aesthetics and folklore, and their mission was race propaganda and pure art.nbsp;nbsp;Adding to their visibility were famous jazz musicians, producers of all-black revues, and bootleggers.

Now available in paperback, this richly-illustrated book contains more than 70 black-and-white photographs and drawings.nbsp;nbsp;Steven Watson clearly traces the rise and flowering of this movement, evoking its main figures as well as setting the scene--describing Harlem from the Cotton Club to its literary salons, from its white patrons like Carl van Vechten to its most famous entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong among many others.nbsp;nbsp;He depicts the social life of working-class speakeasies, rent parties, gay and lesbian nightlife, as well as the celebrated parties at the twin limestone houses owned by hostess A'Lelia Walker.nbsp;nbsp;This is an important history of one of America's most influential cultural phenomenons.

The Harlem Renaissance

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party

Curtis J. Austin's Up Against the Wall chronicles how violence brought about the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, dominated its policies, and finally destroyed the party as one member after another - Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Alex Rackley - left the party, was killed, or was imprisoned. Austin shows how the party's early emphasis in the 1960s on self-defense, though sorely needed in black communities at the time, left it open to mischaracterization, infiltration, and devastation by local, state, and federal police forces and government agencies. Austin carefully highlights the internal tension between advocates of a more radical position than the Panthers took, who insisted on military confrontation with the state, and those such as Newton and David Hilliard, who believed in community organizing and alliance building as first priorities. Austin interviewed a number of party members who had heretofore remained silent. With the help of these stories, Austin is able to put the violent history of the party in perspective and show that the "survival" programs, such as the Free Breakfast for Children program and Free Health Clinics, helped the black communities they served to recognize their own bases of power and ability to save themselves.

Up Against the Wall

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This provocative study examines the far-reaching influence of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Theodore G. Vincent details UNIA's origins and clarifies the many myths and controversies surrounding the organization and its founder. Initially written to explore the black militancy movement of the 1920s from the point of view of the Black Power struggles of the 1960s, the author's new introduction adds a 21st-century perspective.

Black Power and the Garvey Movement

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First published in 1954, a time when few books on African history were written from an African perspective. An intimate history of Africa and its ancient civilizations, the book opposed the stereotyped and often racist histories of Africa. Today, a half century after its initial publication, African Glory still provides a vivid and dynamic connection to the African past.

African Glory

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As Africans and descendants of slaves have sought to expand an understanding of their history, focus on the African diaspora--the global dispersal of a people and their culture--has increased. African studies have assumed a prominent place in historical scholarship, and a growing number of non-African scholars has helped revise a discipline established over several decades.

The six contributions in this volume were compiled as a result of the thirtieth Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture held at the University of Texas at Arlington. The contributors, nationally recognized in the field, represent a collaborative analysis of the African diaspora from African and non-African perspectives.

Joseph E. Harris discusses how the African diaspora influences the economies, politics, and social dynamics of both the homeland and the host country. Alusine Jalloh reconstructs the mercantile activities of the Fula in colonial Sierra Leone.

Joseph E. Inikori argues that slavery and serfdom in medieval Europe provide greater insights into precolonial Africa than do standard New World comparisons. Colin A. Palmer examines the power relationships that undergirded American slavery in order to better understand the enslaved.

Douglas B. Chambers reveals the enduring influence of Africanisms in the historical development of Afro-Virginian slave culture. And Dale T. Graden looks at African slavery in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil between 1848 and 1856, focusing on the Bahian elite and their response to slave resistance.

The African Diaspora

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Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality

From the time the first tracks were laid in the early 19th century, the railroad has occupied a crucial place in America's historical imagination. Now, for the first time, Eric Arnesen gives us an untold piece of that vital American institution - the story of African Americans on the railroad.

Brotherhoods of Color

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#hardcover #historical #pulitzerprize #africanamerican 

A Novel

"Oprah's Book Club 2016 selection"--Sticker on jacket.

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club)

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The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

A look at the flight of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between 1940 and 1970 presents the migrants' stories about everything from rural sharecropper shacks to urban housing projects. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

The Promised Land

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The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo

This biography examines the controversial life, murder and subsequent character assassination of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who, murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965, became a civil rights martyr in Alabama.

From Selma to Sorrow

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Women Who Started It

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in southern and black history.  With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.

"This autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott is the most important document on that highly significant episode since Martin Luther King's own version, Stride Towards Freedom.   I feel certain that scholars and students will refer to this unique historical source for generations to come."
--J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan

"This valuable first-hand account of the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, written by an important, behind-the-scenes organizer, evokes the emotional intensity of the civil rights struggle.  It ought to be required reading for all Americans who value their freedom and the contribution of black women to our history."
--Coretta Scott King

"A sharply remembered addition to the literature on what has become an event of mythic proportions, and a sound primer for those interested in community organizing.  The author is scrupulously honest, modest, and gives unsung heroes much deserved praise."
--Kirkus

"This fascinating memoir provides new evidence on the origins and sustaining force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)."
--Anthony O. Edmonds, Library Journal

"There's no substitute for this intimate memoir; it provides an immediacy and graphic intensity never before available."
--Marge Frantz, San Jose Mercury News

"This powerful memoir is a milestone in the history of that boycott and in the American Civil Rights Movement."
--American History Illustrated

"This absorbing study may become a minor classic in the literature of the Montgomery bus boycott. . . . Garrow correctly states in his Foreword that this book is the most important participant-observer account of the Montgomery protest available to students and scholars of the black freedom movement. . . . This straightforward, sensitive memoir is must reading for students of the civil rights movement.  It is a powerful commentary on how a woman and the group she led rose up to throw off an injustice thrust upon them.  When Jo Ann Robinson and other Montgomery women decided no longer to play the role of contented black Southerners, they gave blacks everywhere renewed hope, and they helped to create a national leader who took them closer to the promised land."
--Jimmie L. Franklin, The Alabama Review

"In an absorbing, first-hand narrative, the dignified and unassuming Robinson focuses on the role of the Women's Political Council (WPC) and details the WPC's plans to engineer a boycott months before the heralded arrest of Rosa Parks. . . .  The value of this primary source will endure long after many best-selling, secondary accounts of national politics during this period have disappeared."
--Keith D. Miller and Elizabeth Vander Lei, Explorations in Sight and Sound

Montgomery Bus Boycott

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Black Men and Women Remember World War II

Told in their own words, the stories of 50 men and women from two segregated, black infantry divisions will change the way we think about World War II.

Fighting in the Jim Crow Army

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African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South

The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture. Yet little scholarship exists on these workers and their times. 

William P. Jones merges interviews with archival sources to explore black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in the southern sawmill communities of Elizabethtown, North Carolina; Chapman, Alabama; and Bogalusa, Louisiana. By placing black lumber workers within the history of southern industrialization, Jones reveals that industrial employment was another facet of the racial segregation and political disfranchisement that defined black life in the Jim Crow South. He also examines an older tradition of southern sociology that viewed industrialization as socially disruptive and morally corrupting to African American social and cultural traditions rooted in agriculture.

The Tribe of Black Ulysses

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The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court sounded the death knell for school segregation with its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. So goes conventional wisdom. In fact, writes Peter Irons, today many of our schools are even more segregated than they were on the day when Brown was decided. In this groundbreaking legal history, Irons explores the 150-year struggle against Jim Crow education, showing how the great victory over segregation was won, then lost again. The author of several award-winning books, Irons ranges from 1849 to the present as he describes a battle that has stretched across most of American history. He skillfully weaves a gripping legal drama out of the stories of brave, now-forgotten men and women, of luminaries such as Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren, and explores the impact of the Brown decision on the communities actually involved in the case. Perceptive, fascinating, and devastating, Jim Crow's Childrenis a major contribution to the national debate over race and its implications for the American educational system.

Jim Crow's Children

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Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow

"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America. . . . Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy."--The Washington Post

"The most complete and moving account we have had of what the victims of the Jim Crow South suffered and somehow endured."
--C. Vann Woodward

In April 1899, black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused of raping the man's wife, Hose was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites. His body was sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers; an Atlanta grocery displayed his knuckles in its front window for a week.

With the same narrative skill he brought to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long, Leon Litwack constructs a searing history of life under Jim Crow. Drawing on new documentation and first-person accounts by blacks and whites, he describes the injustices--both institutional and personal--inflicted against a people. Here, too, are the black men and women whose activism, literature, and music preserved the genius of their human spirit. Painstakingly researched, important, and timely, Trouble in Mind recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States--and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day.

"Moving, elegant, earthy and pointed. . . . It forces us to reckon with the tragic legacies of freedom as well as of slavery. And it reminds us of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit."
--Steven Hahn, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"A chilling reminder of how simple it has been for Americans to delude themselves about the power of race." --The Raleigh News & Observer

Trouble in Mind

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The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood

Details the 1923 massacre of black inhabitants of the small Florida town of Rosewood by a white lynch mob, tracing the lives of survivors and describing the unprecedented award given to survivors and their descendants by the state of Florida some seventy years after the rampage. 30,000 first printing.

Like Judgment Day

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The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Widely believed to be the most extreme incident of white racial violence against African Americans in modern United States history, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre resulted in the destruction of over one thousand black-owned businesses and homes as well as the murder of between fifty and three hundred black residents. Exhaustively researched and critically acclaimed, Scott Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land is the definitive account of the Tulsa race riot and its aftermath, in which much of the history of the destruction and violence was covered up. It is the compelling story of racial ideologies, southwestern politics, and incendiary journalism, and of an embattled black community’s struggle to hold onto its land and freedom. More than just the chronicle of one of the nation’s most devastating racial pogroms, this critically acclaimed study of American race relations is, above all, a gripping story of terror and lawlessness, and of courage, heroism, and human perseverance.

Browse by categories

Phillip Thomas Tucker

Cathy Williams

Jacob Levenson

The Secret Epidemic

Carol Jenkins; Elizabeth Gardner Hines

Black Titan

Alice Walker

Anything We Love Can Be Saved

Tammy Evans

The Silencing of Ruby McCollum

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher

The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg

Or Does It Explodes?

John Henrik Clarke

Harlem

Steven Watson

The Harlem Renaissance

Curtis J. Austin; Elbert Howard (Foreword by)

Up Against the Wall

Theodore G. Vincent

Black Power and the Garvey Movement

J. C. de-Graft-Johnson

African Glory

Alusine Jalloh (Editor)

The African Diaspora

Eric Arnesen

Brotherhoods of Color

Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club)

Nicholas Lemann

The Promised Land

Mary Stanton

From Selma to Sorrow

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson; David J. Garrow (Contribution by)

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Maggi M. Morehouse

Fighting in the Jim Crow Army

William P. Jones

The Tribe of Black Ulysses

Peter H. Irons

Jim Crow's Children

Leon F. Litwack

Trouble in Mind

Michael D'Orso

Like Judgment Day

Scott Ellsworth; John Hope Franklin (Foreword by)

Death in a Promised Land

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