J-Rod moves like a small battle tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in every bone-breaking drive to the basket. On the street every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball...

The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a historical novel by African American author, lawyer, and political activist Charles Chesnutt. Based on the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, in which a group of white supremacists rioted and overthrew the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina, killing hundreds of African Americans and displacing thousands more-The Marrow of Tradition follows two interconnected families on opposite sides of the violence. Set...

For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, as gentrification encroaches, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of Harlem's legacy. Examining the epic Harlem of official history and the personal Harlem that begins at her front door, Rhodes-Pitts introduces us to a wide variety of characters, past and...

Concise, readable survey examines the life of a leading spokesman for abolition and one of the most influential promoters of the civil rights movement. Covers Douglass' early life in slavery, his escape from Maryland to New York, his power and charisma as a public speaker, and much more.

West Medford, Massachusetts has been home to a thriving African American community, where families have lived for generations since the end of the Civil War. The stories of its residents have been fading as elders die and families move away. Most of the history of this neighborhood resides within the memories of these few remaining elders. The discovery of over one hundred funeral programs, saved and collected by residents since the mid-twentieth...

"Winner of the 1995 Outstanding Book Award, National Conference of Black Political Scientists" Michael C. Dawson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Political scientists and social choice theorists often assume that economic diversification within a group produces divergent political beliefs and behaviors. Michael Dawson demonstrates, however, that the growth of a black middle class has left race as the dominant...

The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States was the most powerful and effective social movement of the nineteenth century and has served as a recurring source of inspiration for every subsequent struggle against injustice. But the abolitionist story has traditionally focused on the evangelical impulses of white, male, middle-class reformers, obscuring the contributions of many African Americans, women, and others.Prophets of Protest, the...

Based on a heart-rending and much discussed series in the Washington Post, this is the story of one woman and her family living in the projects in Washington, D.C. A transcendent piece of writing, it won the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. For four years Leon Dash of the Washington Post followed the lives of Rosa Lee Cunningham, her children, and five of her grandchildren, in an effort to understand the persistence of poverty...

The moving testimonies of five African-American women comprise this unflinching account of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South. Covering a wide range of narrative styles, the voices provide authentic recollections of hardship, frustration, and hope-from Mary Prince's groundbreaking account of a lone woman's tribulations and courage, the spiritual awakening of "Old Elizabeth," and Mattie Jackson's record of personal achievements, to the memoirs...

Chagrin Falls Park, Ohio, this bucollic town set in the rustic fields of Northestern Ohio continue to represent the dreams and aspirations of a group of African American pioneers who fought not only the harships and vissitudes of this rural existence, but had to at the same time fight racism and prejudice that kept them separated and to a great extent isolated from the lives of those folks that lived all around and consipred to keep them down and...