Black Lives Matter

This classic autobiography of Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement.

Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack, and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free. Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father's steadfast efforts to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. Here, for the first time, Michelle Obama describes the early years of her marriage as she struggles to balance her work and family with her husband's fast-moving political career. She takes us inside their private debate over whether he should make a run for the presidency and her subsequent role as a popular but oft-criticized figure during his campaign. Narrating with grace, good humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family's history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the White House over eight momentous years--as she comes to know her country and her country comes to know her.

This book offers a comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction works that articulate issues of race, democracy, and American identity.

A portrait of one of the most important black leaders of the twentieth century introduces readers to the fiery woman who inspired generations of activists.

At once a powerful evocation of his childhood in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, The Fire Next Time, which galvanized the nation in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable--Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. These are the young kings whom we love to kill--over and over again."

Texas native James Farmer is one of the “Big Four” of the turbulent 1960s civil rights movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. In Lay Bare the Heart, Farmer tells the story of the heroic civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.

One of America's prominent historians and a noted feminist bring together the most important political writings and testimonials from African Americans over three centuries. This unique volume captures the struggle and hope persistent in the movement for social justice. The voices of famous activists like Du Bois, Douglass, and Malcolm X, joined by those of laborers, women, and other African American citizens, reveal how the historical record of oppression and resistance coalesced into a national and international movement.

In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social-media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. Making All Black Lives Matter offers one of the first overviews of Black Lives Matter and explores the challenges and possible future for this growing and influential movement.

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Presents the major ideas expounded by the legendary leader of the Black revolution in America through selected speeches delivered from 1963 to his assassination in 1965.

This volume explores the multi-faceted career of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) in her roles as stateswoman, politician, educational leader, and social visionary. It offers a unique combination of original documentary sources and analysis of Bethune's life and work.

Mark Christian Thompson argues that efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of blackness--a "Black aesthetic dimension" wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.

The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement and presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks.

Tells the stories and documents the contributions of African American women involved in the struggle for racial and gender equality through the civil rights and black power movements in the United States.

John Lewis tells his story of struggle in the civil rights movement, of comradeship in that community, of its battles and triumphs.

In 2013, when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, Patrisse Khan-Cullors' outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin.

In this prophetic work, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.

The first major anthology to trace the development of Black Feminist thought in the United States, Words of Fire is Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s comprehensive collection of writings by more than sixty Black women. From the pioneering work of abolitionist Maria Miller Stewart and anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett to the writings of feminist critics Michele Wallace and bell hooks, Black women have been writing about the multiple jeopardies—racism, sexism, and classism—that have made it imperative to forge a brand of feminism uniquely their own.

The election of Barack Obama gave political currency to the (white) idea that Americans now live in a post-racial society. But the persistence of racial profiling, economic inequality between blacks and whites, disproportionate numbers of black prisoners, and disparities in health and access to healthcare suggest there is more to the story. Author David Ikard tackles these concerns from various perspectives, chief among them black feminism.

The deeply personal story of a historic time in Chicago, Robert B. McKersie's A Decisive Decade follows the unfolding action of the Civil Rights Movement as it played out in the Windy City. McKersie's participation as a white activist for black rights offers a unique, firsthand viewpoint on the debates, boycotts, marches, and negotiations that would forever change the face of race relations in Chicago and the United States at large.

Why does inequality have such a hold on American society and public policy? And what can we, as citizens, do about it? Inequality in America takes an in-depth look at race, class and gender-based inequality, across a wide range of issues from housing and education to crime, employment and health. Why does inequality have such a hold on American society and public policy? And what can we, as citizens, do about it? Inequality in America takes an in-depth look at race, class and gender-based inequality, across a wide range of issues from housing and education to crime, employment and health.

This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is a paradigm-shifting publication that presents the Civil Rights Movement through the work of nine activist photographers-men and women who chose to document the national struggle against segregation and other forms of race-based disenfranchisement from within the movement.

Originally published in 1892, A Voice from the South is the only book published by one of the most prominent African American women scholars and educators of her era. Born a slave, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper would go on to become the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. Cooper became a prominent member of the black community in Washington, D.C., serving as principal at M Street High School, during which time she wrote A Voice from the South. In it, she engages a variety of issues, including women's rights, racial progress, segregation, and the education of black women.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a media and political phenomenon, but, as Christopher J. Lebron points out in this book, it is part of an older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity of black people. Lebron lays out the genesis of the ideas that have built the movement, presenting a foundational blueprint of sorts that can help us make sense of the emotions, demands, and arguments of present-day activists and public thinkers as well as recast the role of historical Black thinkers in American life.

Lifting the Chains is a history of the Black experience in America since the Civil War, told by one of the most distinguished historians of modern America, William H. Chafe. Chafe highlights the role of all-black institutions - especially the churches, lodges, local gangs, neighbourhood women's groups, and the Black college clubs that gathered at local pool halls - that talked up the issues, examined different courses of action, and then put their lives on the line to make change happen.

White Men's Law recounts and explores the legal and extra-legal means by which systemic white racism has kept Black Americans "in their place" from slavery to police and vigilante killings of Black men and women, from 1619 to the present.

This book traces the promise and paradox of the American rule of law in three interwoven ways. It focuses on explicating the ideals of the American rule of law by asking: how do we interpret its history and the goals of its constitutional framers to see the rule of law ambitions its foundational institutions express? It considers those constitutional institutions as inextricable from the problem of race in the United States and the tensions between the rule of law as a protector of property rights and the rule of law as a restrictor on arbitrary power and a guarantor of legal equality. In that context, it explores the distinctive role of Black liberation movements in developing the American rule of law.

From bestselling biographer Kate Clifford Larson comes the first full portrait of Fannie Lou Hamer and her galvanic part in the greatest social movement of our era.

Users looking for authoritative and comprehensive information about black history, figures and accomplishments now have a defining and current reference to address their needs. Readers can find comparative analyses of social movements, languages, religions and family structures in the context of an interdisciplinary framework that fills a substantial gap in studies of this genre.

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father-a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man-has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey-first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.