Showing titles in Black & African American

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman...

Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2025 | BookRiot's Best Books of 2025 | NPR's New Books to Read | Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Book A crucial telling of U.S. history centering the Black women whose magic gave rise to the rich tapestry of American culture, wellness, and spirituality that...

As a black woman, you've navigated a world that often overlooks your struggles and diminishes your worth. But what if you could break free from the chains of societal expectations and embrace your true self? In Self-Love for Black Women, Nya Love takes you on a transformative journey, offering practical tools and strategies to help you overcome past traumas, improve relationships, and cultivate unshakable self-worth.

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue, and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees. “[Melinda] Sewak’s inspiring narration, combined with her storytelling prowess and dedication to historical...

In the mid-1970s, Misty Knight burst onto the pages of Marvel Comics. Before Storm, Shuri, or Riri, Misty opened the doors of comics as Marvel's first Black woman superhero. A detective and martial artist with a bionic arm that gives her heroic strength, Misty personified the undercurrent of independent Black media and the budding post-soul culture. First appearing in 1975, she broke down stereotypes to become one of the backbone characters of the Marvel Universe.

Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of Black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown’s childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.

In this ambitious work, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.

Jesse Owens remains one of the most inspiring figures in modern history—a man whose brilliance on the track became a symbol of hope, defiance, and human dignity in an era overshadowed by racism and rising extremism. Born into poverty in the Jim Crow South and shaped by the Great Migration to the industrial North, Owens rose from humble beginnings to become a global icon whose achievements transcended sport. His life is a story not only of speed and talent, but of perseverance, integrity, and the quiet strength required to challenge prejudice on the world’s biggest stage.

“A manual for fixing our culture…In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process.”—Black Issues Book Review New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed visionary and cultural...

First published in 1903, this groundbreaking work is a cornerstone of African American literary history and a foundational text in the field of sociology. In these fourteen essays, W. E. B. Du Bois introduces and explores the concept of “double-consciousness”—a term he uses to describe the experience of living as an African American and having a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Though an examination of Black life in post-Civil War America, The Souls of Black Folk has had a lasting impact on civil rights and the discussion of race in the United States.

Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others.

Brought to you by Penguin. We Were There is about a Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored – the one that exists beyond London. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in tumult: rocked by Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policy, the rise of the...

Globally, Black people are among the most affected by the climate crisis, despite contributing very little to it. For a long time, the crisis was portrayed as yet another injustice for Black people to care about, on top of the day-to-day oppression they face. In Black Climates, Selina Nwulu reframes the crisis to encompass our disconnection from each other and the world around us. She argues that the root of climate change lies in historical colonial violence and ongoing exploitation, making it inherently racist.

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Bernice’s family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870. Her descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the ‘great migration’, cried when Dr King was assassinated. Wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down through generations of women.

In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.

Here is an unapologetic look into the factors that have caused so many Blacks to think and act in the negative way they do towards themselves and others. This timely body of work is from a man well versed in the American educational system, as well as educational systems throughout the world.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.