Educator, writer, critic, intellectual, film-maker?Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been widely praised as being one of America’s most prominent and prolific scholars. In what will be an essential volume,
Essays examine the challenges faced by African Americans in preserving and shaping African-American history, exposing the myth and conflict surrounding such figures as Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, and Bo
If asked to list the greatest innovators of modern American poetry, few of us would think to include Jay-Z or Eminem in their number. And yet hip hop is the source of some of the most exciting develop
Living in south central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by
In 1773, the slave Phillis Wheatley literally wrote her way to freedom. The first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in English, she was emancipated by her owners in recognition of
In this courageous book, John L. Jackson, Jr. draws on current events as well as everyday interactions to demonstrate the culture of race-based paranoia and its profound effects on our lives. He expl
Whether along race, class, or generational lines, hip-hop music has been a source of controversy since the beats got too big and the voices too loud for the block parties that spawned them. America ha
When Manthia Diawara was in high school, he would pray to Allah to let him get out of Mali, study in Europe, and live happily at least until age fifty. To ask for anything more, he thought, would be
With a new preface by the author. Ten years after his murder, Tupac Shakur is even more loved, contested, and celebrated than he was in life. His posthumously released albums, poetry, and motion pict
In the 1920s, Southern record companies ventured to cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans, where they set up primitive recording equipment in makeshift studios. They brought in street singers,
Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and ’hos. The contro
And in this corner, hailing from Black Bottom, Detroit by way of Harlem, with more victories than Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali combined, the greatest fighter-pound for pound-of all time: Sugar Ray Robi
Cornel West is one of the nation’s premier public intellectuals and one of the great prophetic voices of our era. Whether he is writing a scholarly book or an article for Newsweek, whether he i
Provides a detailed study of the life of the nineteenth-century writer, covering her life under slavery, as a fugitive slave, and in the post-Civil War years, and her writing of the slave narrative "I
Our national conversation about race is ludicrously out of date. Hip hop is the key to understanding how things are changing. In a provocative book that will appeal to hip-hoppers both black and whit
A stirring collection of civil rights speeches includes a never-before-published speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., in a volume that captures the civil rights movements of African Americans, gays, Asi
Darryl Pinckney, the acclaimed author of the novel High Cotton and iconoclast known for his writings in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and elsewhere, affirms the literary power of the A
"As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, Harlem's diverse array of artists and activists launched a bold cultural offensive a
A primer for twenty-first century racial politics in America by the author of Black Leadership proposes a new kind of inclusive democracy that encompasses such positions as the re-enfranchisement of f
