Black Lives Matter: African-American History and Culture

The #1 New York Times Bestseller!

The extraordinary true story and basis for the Academy Award winning film BlacKkKlansman, written and directed by Spike Lee, produced by Jordan Peele, and starring John David Washington and Adam Driver.

A few weeks later the office phone rings, and the caller asks Ron a question he thought he'd never have to answer, "Would you like to join our cause?" This is 1978, and the KKK is on the rise in the United States. Its Grand Wizard, David Duke, has made a name for himself, appearing on talk shows, and major magazine interviews preaching a "kinder" Klan that wants nothing more than to preserve a heritage, and to restore a nation to its former glory.

Ron answers the caller's question that night with a yes, launching what is surely one of the most audacious, and incredible undercover investigations in history. Ron recruits his partner Chuck to play the white Ron Stallworth, while Stallworth himself conducts all subsequent phone conversations. During the months-long investigation, Stallworth sabotages cross burnings, exposes white supremacists in the military, and even befriends David Duke himself.

Black Klansman is an amazing true story that reads like a crime thriller, and a searing portrait of a divided America and the extraordinary heroes who dare to fight back.

2020 NAACP Image Award Nominee - Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)

Best-of Lists: Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) - 25 Can't-Miss Books of 2019 (The Undefeated)

Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world.

Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love--finding beauty and possibility in life--and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition.

Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools.

With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes, Breathe offers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience.

Essays on racial flashpoints, white denial, violence, and the manipulation of fear in America today.

Drawing on events from the killing of Trayvon Martin to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, Wise calls to account his fellow white citizens and exhorts them to combat racist power structures.--The New York Times

"What Tim Wise has brilliantly done is to challenge white folks' truth to see that they have a responsibility to do more than sit back and watch, but to recognize their own role in co-creating a fair, inclusive, truly democratic society."--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

Tim Wise's new book gives us the tools we need to reach people whose understanding of our country is white instead of right. And without pissing them off!--James W. Loewen, author, Lies My Teacher Told Me

Tim Wise's latest is more urgent than ever. --Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy

A white social justice advocate clearly shows how racism is America's core crisis. A trenchant assessment of our nation's ills.--*Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

[Dispatches from the Race War] is a bracing call to action in a moment of social unrest.--Publishers Weekly

Dispatches from the Race War exhorts white Americans to join the struggle for a fairer society.--Chapter 16

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.

Wise devotes a substantial portion of the book to explore the racial ramifications of COVID-19, and the widespread protests which followed the police murder of George Floyd.

Concise, accessible chapters, most written in first-person, offer an excellent source for those engaged in the anti-racism struggle. Tim Wise's proactive approach asks white allies to contend with--and take responsibility for--their own role in perpetuating racism against Blacks and people of color.

Dispatches from the Race War reminds us that the story of our country is the history of racial conflict, and that our future may depend on how--or if--we can resolve it. "To accept racism is quintessentially American," writes Wise, "to rebel against it is human. Be human."

we've never elected a woman as our president.

And we've only had one president who was not a white man.

After working on two presidential campaigns (for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), MSNBC political analyst and SiriusXM host Zerlina Maxwell gained first-hand knowledge of everything liberals have been doing right over the past few elections-and everything they are still doing wrong. Ultimately, these errors worked in President Donald Trump's favor in 2016; he effectively ran a campaign on white identity politics, successfully tapping into white male angst and resistance. In 2020, after the Democratic Party's most historically diverse pool of presidential candidates finally dwindled down to Joe Biden, once again an older white man, Maxwell has posed the ultimate question: what now, liberals?

Fueled by Maxwell's trademark wit and candor, The End of White Politics dismantles the past and present problems of the Left, challenging everyone from scrappy, young "Bernie Bros" to seasoned power players in the "Billionaire Boys' Club." No topic is taboo; whether tackling the white privilege that enabled Mayor Pete Buttigieg's presidential run, the controversial #HashtagActivism of the Millennial generation, the massive individual donations that sway politicians toward maintaining the status quo of income inequality, or the lingering racism that debilitated some Democratic presidential contenders and cut their promising campaigns short, Maxwell pulls no punches in her fierce critique. However, underlying all of these individual issues, Maxwell argues that it's the "liberal-minded" party's struggle to engage women and communities of color-and its preoccupation with catering to the white, male working class-that threatens to be its most lethal shortfall.

The times-and the demographics-are changing, and in order for progressive politics to prevail, we must acknowledge our shortcomings, take ownership of our flaws, and do everything in our power to level the playing field for all Americans. The End of White Politics shows exactly how and why progressives can lean into identity politics, empowering marginalized groups, and uniting under a common vision that will benefit us all.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement.

Matt Taibbi's deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full--with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control.

In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Can't Breathe Taibbi also examines the conditions that made this tragedy possible. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi's kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of recalcitrant police officials.

A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can't Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice.

"Brilliant . . . Taibbi is unsparing is his excoriation of the system, police, and courts. . . . This is a necessary and riveting work."--Booklist (starred review)

Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon and key figure of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president.

Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist for Swallow Me Whole).

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.

Many years ago, John Lewis and other student activists drew inspiration from the 1958 comic book "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story." Now, his own comics bring those days to life for a new audience, testifying to a movement whose echoes will be heard for generations.

Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award -- Special Recognition
#1 Washington Post Bestseller
A Coretta Scott King Honor Book
An ALA Notable Book
One of YALSA's Top 10 Great Graphic Novels for Teens
One of YALSA's Top 10 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults
One of YALSA's Outstanding Books for the College Bound
One of Reader's Digest's Graphic Novels Every Grown-Up Should Read
Endorsed by NYC Public Schools' "NYC Reads 365" program
Selected for first-year reading programs by Michigan State University, Marquette University, and Georgia State University
Nominated for three Will Eisner Awards
Nominated for the Glyph Award
Named one of the best books of 2013 by USA Today, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, The Horn Book, Paste, Slate, ComicsAlliance, Amazon, and Apple iBooks.

Want to Better Understand Socialism? New York Magazine recommends The Meaning of Freedom

What is the meaning of freedom? Angela Y. Davis' life and work have been dedicated to examining this fundamental question and to ending all forms of oppression that deny people their political, cultural, and sexual freedom. In this collection of twelve searing, previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States. With her characteristic brilliance, historical insight, and penetrating analysis, Davis addresses examples of institutional injustice and explores the radical notion of freedom as a collective striving for real democracy - not something granted or guaranteed through laws, proclamations, or policies, but something that grows from a participatory social process that demands new ways of thinking and being. The speeches gathered together here are timely and timeless, writes Robin D.G. Kelley in the foreword, they embody Angela Davis' uniquely radical vision of the society we need to build, and the path to get there.

The Meaning of Freedom articulates a bold vision of the society we need to build and the path to get there. This is her only book of speeches.

Davis' arguments for justice are formidable. . . . The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied.--The New York Times

One of America's last truly fearless public intellectuals. --Cynthia McKinney, former US Congresswoman

Angela Davis deserves credit, not just for the dignity and courage with which she has lived her life, but also for raising important critiques of a for-profit penitentiary system decades before those arguments gained purchase in the mainstream. --Thomas Chatterton Williams, SFGate

Angela Davis's revolutionary spirit is still strong. Still with us, thank goodness!
--Virginian-Pilot

Long before 'race/gender' became the obligatory injunction it is now, Angela Davis was developing an analytical framework that brought all of these factors into play. For readers who only see Angela Davis as a public icon . . . meet the real Angela Davis: perhaps the leading public intellectual of our era. --Robin D. G. Kelley author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

There was a time in America when to call a person an 'abolitionist' was the ultimate epithet. It evoked scorn in the North and outrage in the South. Yet they were the harbingers of things to come. They were on the right side of history. Prof. Angela Y. Davis stands in that proud, radical tradition. --Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A.

Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis, open, relentless, and on time! --June Jordan

A groundbreaking and visionary call to action on educating and supporting girls of color, from the highly acclaimed author of Pushout

Monique Morris is a personal shero of mine and a respected expert in this space.
--Ayanna Pressley, U.S. congresswoman and the first woman of color elected to Boston's city council

Wise Black women have known for centuries that the blues have been a platform for truth-telling, an underground musical railroad to survival, and an essential form of resistance, healing, and learning. In her highly anticipated follow-up to the widely acclaimed Pushout, now a core text for teachers and principals on the criminalization of Black girls in schools, leading advocate Monique W. Morris invokes the spirit of the blues to articulate a radically healing and empowering pedagogy for Black and Brown girls.

A clarion call for educators, parents, and anyone who has a stake in a better tomorrow to transform schools into places where learning and collective healing can flourish, these pages journey from Oakland to Ohio and from New York to Iowa City and beyond. Morris describes with candor and love what it looks like to meet the complex needs of girls on the margins. In doing so she offers a collection of gems from educators who are attuned to the patterns of pain and struggle, and who show how adults working in schools can harness their wisdom to partner with students and help the girls they teach find value and joy in learning.

Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues reimagines what education might look like if schools placed the thriving of Black and Brown girls at their center. Morris brings together research and real life in this chorus of interviews, case studies, and the testimonies of remarkable people who work successfully with girls of color. The result is this radiant manifesto--a guide to moving away from punishment, trauma, and discrimination toward safety, justice, and genuine community in our schools.

In the tradition of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and Other People's Children, Morris's new book is a clarion call--for educators, parents, students, and anyone who has a stake in a better tomorrow--to transform schools into places where learning and collective healing can flourish.

Book cover photograph by Brittsense/brittsense.com.

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.

In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women--Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more--who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors' and asha bandele's instant New York Times bestseller, When They Call You a Terrorist is now adapted for the YA audience with photos and journal entries!

A movement that started with a hashtag--#BlackLivesMatter--on Twitter spread across the nation and then across the world.

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Khan-Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.

In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.