"What is the value of Black life in America?" In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel-the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus-to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin's long histor...
LRRPs had to be the best. Anything less meant certain death. When Ed Emanuel was handpicked for the first African American special operations LRRP team in Vietnam, he knew his six-man team couldn’t have asked for a tougher proving ground than Cu Chi in the summer of 196868. Home to the largest Viet cong tunnel complex in Vietnam, Cu Chi was the deadly heart of the enemy’s stronghold in Tay Ninh Province. Team 2/6 of Company F, 51st Infantry, was quickly dubbed the Soul Patrol, a gimmicky labe...
Behind the Laughter
by Anthony Griffith and Dr. Brigitte Travis-Griffin
"I was living every comic's dream...with a nightmare attached."Anthony Griffith, a stand-up comic from Chicago's South Side, has lived on the borderline of comedy and tragedy. At the very time his career as a stand-up comedian was taking off, and he had finally achieved his dream of appearing on The Tonight Show, he was also enduring an unimaginable personal nightmare: his two-year-old daughter, Brittany Nicole, was dying from cancer. While Anthony performed under bright lights, he struggled not...
The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary filmIn June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work...
Ron Mallett was just 10 when his father died suddenly. Devastated, he found solace in the science fiction of H.G. Wells, believing that if he could build a time machine, he could go back into the past, warn his father and perhaps save his life.Ronald Mallett is now a professor of theoretical physics. Remarkably, this working-class African American boy from the Bronx stuck with his vision, overcoming poverty and prejudice in the pursuit of his obsession. This is the story of his extraordinary jou...
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...
In the late 1920s, Reverend A. W. Nix (1880–1949), an African American Baptist minister born in Texas, made fifty-four commercial recordings of his sermons on phonographs in Chicago. On these recordings, Nix presented vocal traditions and styles long associated with the southern, rural Black church as he preached about self-help, racial uplift, thrift, and Christian values. As southerners like Nix fled into cities in the North to escape the rampant racism in the South, they contested whether or...
In 1994, James 'Lights Out' Toney had battled to the top of the boxing world. A stunning knockout of undefeated 20-1 favorite Michael Nunn had brought Toney the middleweight title and crossover celebrity. Heralded as 'throwback', Toney's dazzling skills and constant activity recalled the Golden Age fighters who had been his role models. Brash, volatile and fearless, Toney also personified the 90s hiphop culture that America both feared and admired, a role he embraced with lavish spending, press...
For more than forty years, Tony March generously donated most of his fortune and countless hours to help those in need, but no one ever knew-until now. To the public, he was the founder of one of the most successful minority-owned businesses in the country, a champion for minority business owners, and a respected community leader entrusted to manage $1 billion in state funds. Privately, however, Tony indulged his true passion: getting his hands dirty serving the homeless community. In shocki...
First published in 1920, this groundbreaking work by the pioneering African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois is not only original and probing in its brilliant ideas but also experimental in presentation, ranging from detailed sociopolitical analyses to lyrical and poetic presentations. After an opening autobiographical essay, Du Bois launches a series of critical commentaries on some of the most important issues pertaining to white-black relations. Perhaps the most provocative of these, titled...