Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change National Book Award Collection

In 1969, with America's cities in turmoil and racial tensions high, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick announced an audacious plan: he would build a new city in rural North Carolina, open to all but intended primarily to benefit Black people. Named Soul City, the community secured funding from the Nixon administration, planning help from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and endorsements from the New York Times and the Today show. Before long, the brand-new settlement - built on a former slave plantation - had roads, houses, a health care center, and an industrial plant. By the year 2000, projections said, Soul City would have fifty thousand residents. But the utopian vision was not to be. The race-baiting Jesse Helms, newly elected as senator from North Carolina, swore to stop government spending on the project. Meanwhile, the liberal Raleigh News & Observer mistakenly claimed fraud and corruption in the construction effort. Battered from the left and the right, Soul City was shut down after just a decade. Today, it is a ghost town - and its industrial plant, erected to promote Black economic freedom, has been converted into a prison. In a gripping, poignant narrative, acclaimed author Thomas Healy resurrects this forgotten saga of race, capitalism, and the struggle for equality. Was it an impossible dream from the beginning? Or a brilliant idea thwarted by prejudice and ignorance? And how might America be different today if Soul City had been allowed to succeed?

This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration-a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South. Drawing on teachers' reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama's Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change.

A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice. Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe. Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others. She refused to be sidelined in the movement and refused to be intimidated by those of higher social status and with better jobs and education. In these pages, Hamer’s words and ideas take center stage, allowing us all to hear the activist’s voice and deeply engage her words, as though we had the privilege to sit right beside her.

Few figures embody the physical courage, unstinting sacrifice, and inspired heroism behind the Civil Rights movement more than Fannie Lou Hamer. For millions hers was the voice that made "This Little Light of Mine" an anthem. Her impassioned rhetoric electrified audiences. At the DemocraticConvention in 1964, Hamer's televised speech took not just Democrats but the entire nation to task for abetting racial injustice, searing the conscience of everyone who heard it. Born in the Mississippi Delta in 1917, Hamer was the 20th child of Black sharecroppers and raised in a world in whichracism, poverty, and injustice permeated the cotton fields. As the Civil Rights Movement began to emerge during the 1950s, she was struggling to make a living with her husband on lands that her forebears had cleared, ploughed, and harvested for generations. When a white doctor sterilized her withouther permission in 1961, Hamer took her destiny into her own hands.Bestselling biographer Kate Clifford Larson offers the first account of Hamer's life for a general audience, capturing and illuminating what made Hamer the electrifying force that she became when she walked onto stages across the country during the 1960s and until her death in 1977. Walk with Medoes justice to the full force of Hamer's activism and example. Based on new sources, including recently opened FBI files and Oval Office transcripts, the biography features interviews with some of the people closest to Hamer and conversations with Civil Rights leaders who fought alongside her.Larson's biography will become the standard account of an extraordinary life.

Some of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement are those of young people engaged in social activism, such as children and teenagers in 1963 being attacked by police in Birmingham with dogs and water hoses. But their contributions have not been well documented or prioritized. The Young Crusaders is the first book dedicated to telling the story of the hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers who engaged in sit-ins, school strikes, boycotts, marches, and demonstrations in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other national civil rights leaders played little or no part. It was these young activists who joined in the largest civil rights demonstration in US history- the system-wide school boycott in New York City on February 3, 1964, where over 360,000 elementary and secondary school students went on strike and thousands attended freedom schools. Later that month, tens of thousands of children and teenagers participated in the "Freedom Day" boycotts in Boston and Chicago, also demanding "quality integrated education." Distinguished historian V. P. Franklin illustrates how their ingenuity made these and numerous other campaigns across the country successful in bringing about the end to legalized racial discrimination. It was these unheralded young people who set the blueprint for today's youth activists and their campaigns to address poverty, joblessness, educational inequality, and racialized violence and discrimination. Understanding the role of children and teenagers transforms how we understand the Civil Rights Movement and the broader part young people have played in shepherding social and educational progress, and it serves as a model for the youth-led "reparatory justice" campaigns seen today mounted by Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, and the Sunrise Movement.

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

Heather McGhee's specialty is the American economy--and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm--the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others.

In The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes. Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced. These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers. These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.

This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

Videos capturing everyday indignities and injury toward Black or Brown consumers have become media staples, showing the complexity, risk, and traumas many shoppers encounter in retail, restaurants, and other marketplaces. But each one quickly fades in the media spotlight. In Retail Racism, Michelle Dunlap helps readers understand the ongoing experiences of Black and Brown people as they navigate this reality. Based on 19 in-depth interviews with consumers across the country, Dunlap aims to create a larger discussion that engages readers and empowers them to interrupt, disrupt, and ameliorate the inappropriate and racialized handling of consumers in America today. In doing so, Retail Racism is about not only shopping, but also humane living in America, including surviving and making sense of inequitable experiences, what to do about them, and the larger issues and contexts that surround the marketplace for Black and Brown people.

In his infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Chief Justice Taney had denied that any American descended from Africans, whether free or slave, could claim citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause repudiated this principle. The Fourteenth Amendment's connection to birthright citizenship, however, is not built exclusively through the lives and fortunes of black citizens. It requires an understanding of the Chinese experience of migration to the United States, and Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898) lies at the center of this story. Wong Kim Ark, a man in his mid-twenties who had been born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was refused entry into the United States upon returning from a visit to China. By 1898, the strict policy forbidding most Chinese from entering the United States was well established, and Wong Kim Ark did not claim to fall into one of the narrow exceptional categories like merchant, diplomat, or student. Rather, he claimed that his birth in San Francisco rendered him a citizen. By a vote of six to two, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. The landmark case established the principle that jus soli (geographically defined birthright citizenship) extended even to the children of US residents who were themselves barred from naturalization on racial grounds. In recent years, birthright citizenship in the United States has provoked renewed controversy. In a political moment when Americans are deeply divided over immigration, there is a special need to understand anew the history behind the longstanding principle that even the children of undocumented immigrants are citizens when they are born in the United States.

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the black civil rights movement. Yet, school integration was not the only-or even always the dominant-civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift, community empowerment, and self-determination. An African American Dilemma offers a social history of debates over school integration within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. This broad geographical and temporal focus reveals that northern Black educational activists vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. Yet, as there was never a consensus, this study also highlights the chorus of dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms. A sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, this study complicates our understanding of school integration by highlighting the diverse perspectives of Black students, parents, teachers, and community leaders all committed to improving public education. It finds that Black school integrationists and separatists have worked together in a dynamic tension that fueled effective strategies for educational reform and the black civil rights movement. This study draws on an enormous range of archival data including the black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases.

On June 8, 1883, Rev. Elisha Green was traveling by train from Maysville to Paris, Kentucky. At Millersburg, about forty students from the Millersburg Female College crowded onto the train, accompanied by their music teacher, Frank L. Bristow, and the college president, George T. Gould. Gould grabbed the reverend by the shoulder and ordered him to give up his seat. When Green refused, Bristow and Gould assaulted him until the conductor intervened and ordered the assailants to stop or he would throw them off of the train. Friends advised Green to take legal action, and he did, winning his case against his assailants in March 1884, though with only token compensation. The significance of this case lies not only in the prevailing justice of the 1800s, but also in the fact that a black man won a lawsuit against two white men. In The assault on Elisha Green: race and religion in a Kentucky community, historian Randolph Paul Runyon recounts one man's pursuit of justice over violence and racism in the nineteenth century. He tells the story of Green's life and follows the network of relationships that led to the event of the assault. Tracing these three men's lives brings the reader from the slavery era to the eve of the First World War, from Kentucky to New Mexico, from Covington to the Kentucky River Palisades, with particular focus on Mason and Bourbon Counties.

In the decade after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board decision, it became clear to students, parents, and community members alike that court cases were insufficient in the pursuit of educational justice. This book explores what made it difficult for educational equality to become obtainable after the Brown decision as well as the resilience and activism of younger Black students who sought to enforce equality-even when the government could not. The 1954 ruling enabled public schools to reach a degree of desegregation but did not enable them to become "the learning institutions they could have become" due to the actions of white officials and local white communities who construed Black youth's articulation of educational redress as "adversarial" instead of as a "communal enterprise." Importantly, Audacious Agitation does not portray Black youth as objects of study but rather highlights their powerful agency in increasing opportunity for themselves through the educational system.

Birmingham, Alabama gave birth to momentous events that spawned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and affected world history. But that is not why it is known as the Magic City. It earned that nickname with its meteoric rise from a cornfield valley to an industrial boomtown in the late 1800s. Images of snarling dogs and fire hoses of the 1960s define popular perception of the city, obscuring the complexity of race relations in a tumultuous time and the contributions of white citizens who quietly or boldly influenced social change. Behind the Magic Curtain peels back history's veil to reveal an intriguing cast of characters that include not only progressive members of the Jewish, Christian, and education communities, but also a racist businessman and a Ku Klux Klan member, who, in ironic twists, helped bring about justice and forward racial equality and civil rights. Woven throughout are the firsthand recollections of a reporter with the state's major newspaper. Embedded with law enforcement, he worked with local law officers and FBI agents in secret wiretapping and intelligence operations. With a deft hand, Thorne offers insights from important but little-known perspectives, painting a multihued portrait of a city that has figured so prominently in civil rights history.

The first major study to consider Black women's activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists' quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas's agrarian history.

Few have faced adversity like Alvin Brooks has. He was born into an impoverished family, he nearly lost his adoptive father to the justice system of the South, and he barely survived a health crisis in infancy. However, his greatest challenges would be learning how to navigate a racist society as a young boy and then later protecting his beloved wife, Carol, and their six children. Despite all the adversity he faced, Brooks became a lifelong leader and a servant of his community. Brooks served as one of Kansas City's first Black police officers in the fifties, helped to heal the racial divide after the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., founded the AdHoc Group Against Crime, affecting real change in city government, and met with successive American presidents on national issues. When it comes to criminal justice, civil rights, and racial inequity, Brooks's lifetime of building bridges across society's divides helps us better understand our past, make sense of our present, and envision our future. Alvin Brooks proves that a good heart, a generous spirit, and a lot of work can connect the world; one person can make a difference by binding us together.

When Angela Davis (b. 1944) was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1970 and after she successfully gained acquittal in the 1972 trial that garnered national and international attention, she became one of the most recognizable and iconic figures in the twentieth century. An outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, she has written extensively about the intersections between race, class, and gender; Black liberation; and the US prison system. Conversations with Angela Davis seeks to explore Davis's role as an educator, scholar, and activist who continues to engage in important and significant social justice work. Featuring seventeen interviews ranging from the 1970s to the present day, the volume chronicles Davis's life and her involvement with and influence on important and significant historical and cultural events. Davis comments on a range of topics relevant to social, economic, and political issues from national and international contexts, and taken together, the interviews explore how her views have evolved over the past several decades.

Taking joy in suffering is more human than we'd like to admit. The cruelty of the Trump administration's policies and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets are intimately connected. Shared cruelty and the delight it brings are critical moments of connection for white supremacists, a fact that is not new. Adam Serwer has been chronicling our political landscape for the last decade. He is one of the most resonant voices of our time, relentless in his pursuit of fact, unsentimental in his storytelling, yet deeply humane in his perspective. At The Atlantic, he has written about the Supreme Court's role in Jim Crow; the history of "white genocide" conspiracy theory; hoaxes; racism; inequality; and of course, Trump. But this collection isn't just about Trump--it's an investigation across centuries interrogating both this moment and its antecedents to reveal the deep roots that have given rise to Trumpism.

This book argues that acknowledgment of painful pasts at the geographic and ideological center of American national identity is crucial for addressing inequities in the present. The study analyzes four major museums on the National Mall that are dedicated to traumatic histories: the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Paying close attention to museum narratives and visual displays, Gruenewald explains how even some of the most harrowing and disturbing aspects of America's history have been and are still framed to support core American ideologies.

Forty years ago, a South African rugby tour in the United States became a crucial turning point for the nation's burgeoning protests against apartheid and a test of American foreign policy. In Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement, Derek Charles Catsam tells the fascinating story of the Springbok's 1981 US tour and its impact on the country's anti-apartheid struggle. The US lagged well behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the vexing question of South Africa's racial policies, but the rugby tour changed all that. Those who had been a part of the country's tiny anti-apartheid struggle for decades used the visit from one of white South Africa's most cherished institutions to mobilize against both apartheid sport and the South African regime more broadly. Flashpoint serves as a poignant reminder that sports and politics have always been closely intertwined.

The story of Black education is about more than desegregation and inclusion in mainstream schooling. Jarvis Givens returns to the classrooms of Jim Crow to highlight the forgotten work of Carter G. Woodson and his followers, who undertook the radical act of educating Black children. Their subversive methods continue to provide a model today.

In the American South, the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the struggle to abolish racial segregation erupted in dramatic scenes at lunch counters, in schools, and in churches. The admission of James Meredith as the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama; and the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis-where Martin Luther King was assassinated-rank as cardinal events in black Americans' fight for their civil rights. The photographs featured in I AM A MAN: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970 bear witness to the courage of protesters who faced unimaginable violence and brutality as well as the quiet determination of the elderly and the angry commitment of the young. Talented photographers documented that decade and captured both the bravery of civil rights workers and the violence they faced.

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history. Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

The killing of Emmett Till is widely remembered today as one of the most famous examples of lynchings in America. African American children in 1955 personally felt the terror of his murder. These children, however, would rise up against the culture that made Till's death possible. From the violent Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-ins in Jackson to the school walkouts of McComb, the young people of Mississippi picketed, boycotted, organized, spoke out, and marched, working to reveal the vulnerability of black bodies and the ugly nature of the world they lived in. These children changed that world. In the Name of Emmett Till: How the Children of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle Tore Down Yesterday and Showed Us Tomorrow weaves together the riveting tales of those young women and men of Mississippi, figures like Brenda Travis, the Ladner sisters, and Sam Block who risked their lives to face down vicious Jim Crow segregation. Readers also discover the adults who guided the young people, elders including Medgar Evers, Robert Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer. This inspiring new book of history for young adults from award-winning author Robert H. Mayer is an unflinching portrayal of life in the segregated South and the bravery of young people who fought that system. As the United States still reckons with racism and inequality, the activists working In the Name of Emmett Till can serve as models of activism for young people today.

C. T. Vivian's life was never defined by the discrimination and hardship he faced, although there were many instances of both throughout his lifetime. The late civil rights leader instead focused on his faith in God and his steadfast belief in nonviolence, extending these principles nationwide as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It's In the Action contains Vivian's recollections, ranging from finding religion at the young age of five to his imprisonment as part of the Freedom Rides. The late civil rights leader's heart wrenching and inspiring stories from a lifetime of nonviolent activism come just in time for a new generation of activists, similarly responding to systems of injustice, violence, and oppression. It's In the Action is a record of a life dedicated to selflessness and morality, qualities achieved by Vivian that we can all aspire to.

In The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir's Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era, Jack Beermann tells the story of the injustice done to Madame Josephine DeCuir in July 1872 aboard the Governor Allen steamship on her overnight journey up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Point Coupee Parish. DeCuir was denied a room in the ladies' cabin due to her status as a woman of color. Nine days after the trip she filed suit against Captain John Benson, claiming that the refusal to accommodate her violated an 1869 Louisiana statute. The Supreme Court case that followed, in which the US Supreme Court reversed the Louisiana Supreme Court's decision, is a rich source of information about the racial attitudes in the aftermath of the Civil War, the special situation of the French-speaking people of color in Louisiana, and the post-Reconstruction 'redemption' of the South that followed the disputed election of 1876.

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of African American women on stage and in the recording studio. Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural intellectual. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, collecting, and rock and roll music criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cecile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as serious cultural historians. Above all, Liner Notes for the Revolution reads Black female musicians and entertainers as intellectuals. At stake is the question of who gets to tell the story of Black women in popular music and how.

The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For the general public, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans know about that remarkable decade of struggle. In The Movement, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement.

The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the "imperial grammars of blackness." This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late-Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it. The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on "the other side of terror", which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.

Before the 1960s, the distinction between violent and nonviolent crime played hardly any role in the law. Since then, the number of crimes deemed violent has skyrocketed. David Alan Sklansky shows how shifting and inconsistent legal definitions of violence have fueled mass incarceration, protected abusive police, and undermined criminal justice.

Point of Reckoning provides a highly-detailed portrait of the evolving relationship between Duke University's black students and the university administration from the moment of desegregation through the end of the 1960s, showing the enormous influence Jim Crow racial attitudes had over how these students were perceived and treated. Theodore D. Segal examines the role that race played in how Duke faculty, administrators and trustees perceived and responded to the school's new black students and the black students' attempts to find their place at Duke. It takes the reader "inside" the evolving relationship between the black students and the university, telling the story in the words of the participants. The book explores the racial myths and justifications embraced by many at Duke who found change in race relations abhorrent, impolitic, inconvenient, or just uncomfortable.

A Cold Civil War has engulfed the nation. After a deadly pandemic, shocking incidents of police brutality, a racial justice crisis, and the fall of a dangerous demagogue, America remains more divided than at any time in decades. At the heart of this national crisis is the fear of a darkening America--a country in which there is no longer a predominant white majority. As the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, its leaders have incited white Americans in a last-ditch race against time to stop the advance of a new, multiracial emerging majority. Keith Boykin, long time political commentator, has watched this white resentment consume the GOP over the course of a life in politics, activism, and journalism. He has also observed the divisions among Democrats, as white progressives have postponed demands for full racial equity, while Black voters have often been too forgiving of party leaders who have failed to deliver. America can no longer avoid its long overdue reckoning with the past, Boykin argues. With the familiarity of personal experience and the acuity of historical insight, Boykin urges us to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and save the union, not just by making Black lives matter, but by making Black lives equal.

Why have white supremacists and Black activists been so focused on Black mobility? From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought for over a century to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of "separate but equal" involved trains and buses, Mia Bay went back to the sources with some basic questions: How did travel segregation begin? Why were so many of those who challenged it in court women? How did it move from one form of transport to another, and what was it like to be caught up in this web of contradictory rules? From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. "There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the 'Jim Crow' car of the southern United States," W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared. Bay unearths troves of supporting evidence, rescuing forgotten stories of undaunted passengers who made it back home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored. Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations and insisting on justice in the courts. Traveling Black upends our understanding of Black resistance, documenting a sustained fight that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. A masterpiece of scholarly and human insight, this book helps explain why the long, unfinished journey to racial equality so often takes place on the road.

America's reckoning with its unmet promises on race and class is at a boiling point not seen since the 1960s. Drawing on a lifetime of frontline culture-shifting advocacy, organizing, and fighting for equal justice, Mallory demands change, and shares the keys to effective activism both for those new to and long-committed to the defense of Black lives. The result is a revelatory examination of the challenges we face, of the forces we must overcome, and a blueprint for all who maintain hope for social equity and a better tomorrow.