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From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos — and a call for a more just practice of science.In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theo...
Imani Perry
Mar 15, 2021The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
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Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantatio...
Imani Perry
Jan 29, 2021The Meaning of Soul
Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (Refiguring American Music)
In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such a...
Imani Perry
Sep 14, 2020A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapte...
Sullivan spent ten years unearthing the little-known early decades of the NAACP’s activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins—as well as a h...
Imani Perry
Jan 10, 2020From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen disc...
One man’s thrilling journey through an enchanted world to find his wife, who has disappeared after seemingly committing an unforgiveable act of violence, from the award-winning author of the The Devil in Silver and Big Machine.Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business calle...
In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this vibrantly written biography, Katherine Charro...
Imani Perry
Jan 21, 2019Ready from Within
Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A First Person Narrative
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Septima Clarke played one of the most essential, but little-recognized roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, she was a public school teacher until 1956, when she was dismissed for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the advancement of Colored People. Subsequently, she worked f...
Imani Perry
Jan 21, 2019The Lost Education of Horace Tate
Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools
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In the epic tradition of Eyes on the Prize and with the cultural significance of John Lewis’s March trilogy, an ambitious and harrowing account of the devoted black educators who battled southern school segregation and inequality“Negroes cannot and will not be free or integrated if all that they have is relinquished, emasculated, given up, or aband...
Imani Perry
Jan 21, 2019Also recommended by
Jeff RaikesThe Movement
Documentary of a Struggle for Equality
Simon And Schuster, 1964. First Printing. Some yellowing from age. Some age-related wear. The Movement, Documentary of a Struggle for Equality with text by Lorraine Hansberry. Collectible photo book of the struggle for Racial equality....
Imani Perry
Jan 21, 2019Selma, Lord, Selma by Sheyann Webb-Christburg
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis
At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Bloody Lowndes by Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Why We Can't Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown
The New Way of the World by Pierre Dardot
Capitalism by Arundhati Roy