Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when hig...
Until recently, Rosa Parks's personal papers were unavailable to the public. In this compelling new book from the Library of Congress, where the Parks Collection is housed, the civil rights icon is revealed for the first time in print through her private manuscripts and handwritten notes. Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words illumines her inner thoughts, her ongoing struggles, and how she came to be the person who stood up by sitting down. At the height of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as Parks was both...
The police killing of Christopher Alder was one of the most notorious deaths in custody in the UK, involving the destruction of evidence, a whitewash of an investigation, illegal surveillance, and even giving the family the wrong body to bury. Christopher's sister Janet has been relentlessly fighting for justice, facing a vindictive police force bent on exonerating itself at all costs. This book will be both a probing expose of what went on, based on exhaustive documentary evidence, as well as t...
On January 22, 2004, Darnell Riley broke into the home of Girls Gone Wild founder, Joe Francis. Throughout the night he filmed a blackmail video, and arrange for payment so that the video didn't go viral. What Is Real: The Life and Crimes of Darnell Riley explores the nine years he spent in the custody of California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. On his journey from facility to facility, we see how Riley had to adjust to the reality that the rules inside the walls are not perfec...
In The Rest of the Dream, Lyman Johnson, grassroots civil rights leader, tells his own story. All four of Johnson's grandparents were slaves in Tennessee. Yet his father was a college graduate, principal of a black school, and the inspiration for his son's love of justice. Lyman Johnson was born in 1906 during the darkest days of segregation. He learned from his father not to sit in the "crow's nest" reserved for blacks in his hometown movie theater. This refusal to accept second-class citizens...
Seen around the world, John Carlos and Tommie Smith's Black Power salute on the 1968 Olympic podium sparked controversy and career fallout. Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most iconic images of Olympic history. Here, John Carlos tells his own version of the story. Written in collaboration with Dave Zirin, author of the groundbreaking People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press, 2009 - Turnaround), his eye-opening and immensely readable autobiography finally intro...
The landmark work on race in America from James Baldwin, whose life and words are immortalized in the Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation' James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next...
RECLAIMING will cover a wide breadth of topics from the specific microaggressions black women encounter on dating apps to navigating a career that may seem impossible. Every step of Yewande's writing affirms that maintaining your sense of self in a world that is not supportive of you is difficult, but not impossible. The book will be a thought provoking, sensitive, challenging and deeply moving collection of essays covering everything from identity to love and career choices, published in May 20...
Edwidge Danticat's Writing JourneyToday, Edwidge Danticat is an award-winning writer. But how did she get here? Follow her literary journey from her childhood in Haiti to her relationships-both on the page and in the flesh-with other writing greats in Beginnings, Endings, and Salt. Dive into this prolific fiction writer's stories of her childhood in Haiti without her parents, who had to work an ocean away to make a better life for their family, and explore some of her lyrical creations, such as...
I'm a twenty-two-year-old Black introvert who overthinks everything, can't get a date, yet somehow managed to graduate from Harvard. My story is probably not like yours. I'm a Black boy from the Midwest. I've never been kissed. I'm desperately in love with two women: Aretha and Whitney. I struggle with a mild form of social anxiety. I sing to myself almost everywhere I go. I'm an ex-chitlins (with hot sauce and ketchup) lover. I've been called an Oreo. I've been stopped by the police while wal...