African American Studies category: 2787 books

When Harlem Nearly Killed King spins the tale of a little-known episode in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. how, in 1958, King was stabbed by a deranged black woman in Harlem, and then saved by Harlem Hospital's most acclaimed African-American surgeon, using a little known and difficult procedure. Pearson...

Located north of Cincinnati in the Mill Creek Valley, Lincoln Heights was the first African American self-governing community north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The development of Lincoln Heights began in 1923 when the Haley-Livingston Land Company of Chicago sold lots to black families in an unincorporated...

A freed slave's daring assertion of the evils of slavery Born in present-day Ghana, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped at the age of thirteen and sold into slavery by his fellow Africans in 1770; he worked in the brutal plantation chain gangs of the West Indies before being freed in England....

Author and activist Kevin Powell and contributors Lasana Omar Hotep, Jeff Johnson, Byron Hurt, Dr. William Jelani Cobb, Ryan Mack, Kendrick B. Nathaniel, and Dr. Andre L. Brown tap into the social and political climate rising in the African American community with this collection of essays for Black...

Speaking candidly to veteran sportswriter Mike Shalin for the first time about his often tumultuous career in Major League Baseball, Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd recounts a life that began in the Deep South of Mississippi, and the events that led him toward great heights atop the pitcher’s mound at...

Michael Kay and Lorin Cary illuminate new aspects of slavery in colonial America by focusing on North Carolina, which has largely been ignored by scholars in favor of the more mature slave systems in the Chesapeake and South Carolina. Kay and Cary demonstrate that North Carolina's fast-growing slave...

The civil rights and anti--Vietnam War movements were the two greatest protests of twentieth-century America. The dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1965 took precedence over civil rights legislation, which had dominated White House and congressional attention during the first half...

Frederick Douglass's dramatic autobiographical account of his early life as a slave in America. Born into a life of bondage, Frederick Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write. It was a crime punishable by death, but it resulted in one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever...

   With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today's America. The resulting volume is guaranteed...

As an African American child growing up in St. Augustine, Florida, author Gerald Eubanks had a hard time seeing the victories won during the Civil War in action. Blacks were excluded from opportunities afforded to his white neighbors. Schools were aggressively segregated. Racial tensions simmered....

Specters of Democracy examines how figurations of blackness were used to illuminate the fraught relationship between citizenship, equality, and democracy in the antebellum U.S. Through close readings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Walt Whitman (on aurality),...

When Marita Golden decided to write her personal account of the challenges of raising a black son in today's world, she didn't intend to write more than her own faily's story. But through the story of raising her son against the backdrop of a racially divided society, Golden discovered she was also...

The work of one of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life." -- Washington Post Book World The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America's most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive...

African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars...