An authoritative, lavishly photographed history of the 44th commander-in-chief's presidency evaluates Obama's in-office achievements and disappointments to assess his qualitative legacy, sharing insights into the public and behind-the-scenes events that marked his eight tumultuous years.
Peter Baker’s authoritative history of the Obama presidency is the first complete account that will stand the test of time. Baker takes the measure of Obama's achievements and disappointments in office and brings into focus the real legacy of the man who, as he described himself, "doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills."
With vivid color photographs by New York Times photographers and others of the events, major and minor, public and behind-the-scenes, that defined Barack Obama's eight years in office, Obama: The Call of History is a portrait in full of America's first African-American president against the background of these tumultuous times.
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National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the "real" James Brown after receiving a tip that promises to uncover the man behind the myth. His surprising journey illuminates not only our understanding of this immensely troubled, misunderstood, and complicated soul genius but the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Brown's legacy.
Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul is more than a book about James Brown. Brown's rough-and-tumble life, through McBride's lens, is an unsettling metaphor for American life: the tension between North and South, black and white, rich and poor.
McBride's travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown's never-before-revealed history: the country town where Brown's family and thousands of others were displaced by America's largest nuclear power bomb-making facility; a South Carolina field where a long-forgotten cousin recounts, in the dead of night, a fuller history of Brown's sharecropping childhood, which until now has been a mystery.
McBride seeks out the American expatriate in England who co-created the James Brown sound, visits the trusted right-hand manager who worked with Brown for 41 years, and interviews Brown's most influential non-musical creation, his "adopted son," the Reverend Al Sharpton.
He describes the stirring visit of Michael Jackson to the Augusta, Georgia, funeral home where the King of Pop sat up all night with the body of his musical godfather, spends hours talking with Brown's first wife, and lays bare the Dickensian legal contest over James Brown's estate, a fight that has consumed careers; prevented any money from reaching the poor schoolchildren in Georgia and South Carolina, as instructed in his will; cost Brown's estate millions in legal fees; and left James Brown's body to lie for more than eight years in a gilded coffin in his daughter's yard in South Carolina.
James McBride is one of the most distinctive and electric literary voices in America today, and part of the pleasure of his narrative is being in his presence, coming to understand Brown through McBride’s own insights as a black musician with Southern roots. Kill 'Em and Leave is a song unearthing and celebrating James Brown's great legacy: the cultural landscape of America today.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
The National Book Award-winning author James McBride presents a never-before-published collection of stories that are funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable and imaginative and authentic, and explore the ways we learn from the world and the people around us.
This is exciting new fiction from James McBride, the first since his National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird.
The stories in Five-Carat Soul spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They're all told with McBride's unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail.
McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.
As McBride did in his National Book award-winning The Good Lord Bird and his bestselling The Color of Water, he writes with humor and insight about how we struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend. The result is a surprising, perceptive, and evocative collection of stories that is also a moving exploration of our human condition.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Trayvon Martin's parents take readers beyond the news cycle with an account only they could give: the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement.
On a February evening in 2012, in a small town in central Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home with candy and a can of juice in hand and talking on the phone with a friend when a fatal encounter with a gun-wielding neighborhood watchman ended his young life. The watchman was briefly detained by the police and released. Trayvon's father - a truck driver named Tracy - tried to get answers from the police but was shut down and ignored.
Trayvon's mother, a civil servant for the city of Miami, was paralyzed by the news of her son's death and lost in mourning, unable to leave her room for days. But in a matter of weeks, their son's name would be spoken by President Obama, honored by professional athletes, and passionately discussed all over traditional and social media. And at the head of a growing nationwide campaign for justice were Trayvon's parents, who - driven by their intense love for their lost son - discovered their voices, gathered allies, and launched a movement that would change the country.
Six years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin's name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one black child's death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?
Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin, told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers, for the first time, those questions from the most intimate of sources. It's the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning.
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The book was first released ten years ago, but Anna K. Stone, editor of You're Not Listening: Baltimore Youth Speak Out and veteran Baltimore City School teacher, thought it was important to highlight the lack of change that has occurred in the Baltimore City School system when it comes to listening to Baltimore City Youth.
Thug, deficient, lazy, irresponsible, disadvantaged. Too often, urban youth - particularly African American youth - are portrayed as caricatures. Such labels persist in part because adults are unwilling or unable to listen to what teenagers are saying about themselves.
You're Not Listening: Baltimore Youth Speak Out provides a forum for young people to tell their own stories in their own words about their own lives and in the process, challenge readers to reexamine the predispositions and stereotypes they may hold about cities and city kids.
The young people who speak out in these pages are all growing up amidst underfunded, largely segregated schools, wages that do not keep up with inflation, inadequate health care, substandard housing, and racial profiling. But urban teenagers are not monolithic in their responses to such realities. Some try harder than others to do well in school, some - but not all - work to supplement the family income, and some have strong opinions about racism and poverty, while others have little interest in discussing the subject.
Like all teenagers, they must navigate the choppy waters of adolescent development: forge their own academic, career and sexual identities, establish peer relationships, and negotiate autonomy from parents. They do so in ways that resist the labels imposed by many adults, those who think they know city kids after a superficial glance.
Like all teenagers, they long to be heard and understood. To read this book with an open mind is to take the risk of saying to these thirty-four young people: "I am listening."
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A history of African-Americans in a unique question-and-answer format.
In an homage to Joel Augustus Rogers' 1957 work, Henry Louis Gates Jr. relies on the latest scholarship to offer an overview of African, diasporic and African-American history in Q-and-A format, including such queries as: Who were Africa's first ambassadors to Europe?; Who was the first black president in North America?; Did Lincoln really free the slaves?; and more.
The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogers' now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1934, was billed as "A Negro 'Believe It or Not.'" Rogers's little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the "facts" and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then.
With élan and erudition - and with winning enthusiasm - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger's work. Relying on the latest scholarship, 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history. Among the 100 questions: Who was history's wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better?
Here is a surprising, inspiring, sometimes boldly mischievous - all the while highly instructive and entertaining - compendium of historical curiosities intended to illuminate the sheer complexity and diversity of being "Negro" in the world.
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"Hands down one of the best explorations into the Black male psyche I've ever read." -Essence
Never Stop is the wrenching memoir of Simba Sana, the cofounder and former leader of Karibu Books, a major indie-bookselling phenomenon and perhaps the most successful black-owned company in the history of the book industry. In this memoir, Sana reveals how his experience with Karibu jumpstarted his lifelong journey to better understanding himself, human nature, faith, and American culture - which ultimately helped him develop the powerful personal philosophy that drives his life today.
Born Bernard Sutton in Washington, DC, Sana grew up in the cycle of poverty and violence that dominated inner-city life in the '70s and '80s. Sana's academic success got him into college, where his life increasingly embodied the contradictions that plagued his youth. Committed to self-improvement and self-discipline, he grew into a successful businessman while becoming an impassioned Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist. He lived the corporate life at Ernst & Young by day while leading radical consciousness-raising groups by night.
Building Karibu became Sana's opportunity to bind the disparate elements of his life together. Ultimately, though, the paradoxes in his identity and his accumulated emotional wounds confounded his effort to overcome his business reversals, and everything Sana built - his marriage, family, and business - was lost in an incredibly brief period of time. Sana had to rebuild his life - and his identity - and set out to do so in a way that focused principally on the meaning and importance of love.
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The best-selling author of Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season draws on insider access to present an unauthorized portrait of the iconic champion fighter, arguing that race was a central theme in Muhammad Ali's career, faith and advocacy work and that his political beliefs and neurological health shaped his complex character.
He was the wittiest, the prettiest, the strongest, the bravest, and, of course, the greatest (as he told us himself). Muhammad Ali was one of the twentieth century's most fantastic figures and arguably the most famous man on the planet.
But until now, he has never been the subject of a complete, unauthorized biography. Jonathan Eig, hailed by Ken Burns as one of America's master storytellers, radically reshapes our understanding of the complicated man who was Ali. Eig had access to all the key people in Ali's life, including his three surviving wives and his managers. He conducted more than 500 interviews and uncovered thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files, as well dozens of hours of newly discovered audiotape interviews from the 1960s. Collectively, they tell Ali's story like never before - the story of a man who was flawed and uncertain and brave beyond belief.
"I am America," he once declared. "I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me - black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me."
He was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a sign painter and a housekeeper. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor, and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion, changed his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost. Like so many boxers, he stayed too long.
Jonathan Eig'sAli: A Life reveals Ali in the complexity he deserves, shedding important new light on his politics, religion, personal life, and neurological condition. Ali is a story about America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man who shook up the world.
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A call for change in the United States argues that racial progress can only be achieved after facing difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, and discounted.
In the wake of yet another set of police killings of black men, Michael Eric Dyson wrote a tell-it-straight, no holds barred piece for the New York Times on Sunday July 7: Death in Black and White (it was updated within a day to acknowledge the killing of police officers in Dallas).
The response has been overwhelming. Beyonce and Isabel Wilkerson tweeted it, JJ Abrams, among many other prominent people, wrote him a long fan letter. The New York Times closed the comments section after 2,500 responses, and Dyson has been on NPR, BBC, and CNN non-stop since then.
Fifty years ago Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause: nothing. Dyson believes he was wrong. In Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America he responds to that question.
If we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted. As Dyson writes, "At birth you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead."
"The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know. You think we have been handed everything because we fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it - all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace - should be yours first and foremost, and if there's anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully."
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These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.
Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume.
Acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly.
Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like "The Talking Skull" and "Witches Who Ride," as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s' Southern Workman.
Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations, The Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive.
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Hundreds of stunning images from black history have long been buried in The New York Times archives. None of them were published - until now. Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archives uncovers these never-before published photographs and tells the stories behind them.
It all started with Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh discovering dozens of these photographs. She and three colleagues, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave and Rachel L. Swarns, began exploring the history behind them, and subsequently chronicling them in a series entitled Unpublished Black History, that ran in print and online editions of The Times in February 2016.
The series garnered 1.7 million views on The Times website and thousands of comments from readers. This book includes those photographs and many more, among them: a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson leading an anti-discrimination rally of in Chicago, Rosa Parks arriving at a Montgomery Courthouse in Alabama a candid behind-the-scenes shot of Aretha Franklin backstage at the Apollo Theater, Ralph Ellison on the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood, the firebombed home of Malcolm X, Myrlie Evans and her children at the funeral of her slain husband, a wheelchair-bound Roy Campanella at the razing of Ebbets Field.
Were the photos - or the people in them - not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words at an institution long known as the Gray Lady? Eveleigh, Canedy, Cave, and Swarms explore all these questions and more in this one-of-a-kind book.
Unseen dives deep into The Times photo archives - known as the Morgue - to showcase this extraordinary collection of photographs and the stories behind them.
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This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities.
In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality.
Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in sixty-eight U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world.
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence.
Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.
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The Encyclopedia of Black Comics focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry.
The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers, illustrators, artists, writers, editors, Black comic historians, Black comic convention creators, website creators, archivists and academics - as well as individuals who may not fit into any category but have made notable achievements within and/or across Black comic culture.
"Encyclopedia of Black Comics serves as a treasure map, and interested readers can follow the trails put forward by Howard to seek out African-American work - past, present, and future." -Peter Dabenne, Foreword Reviews
"Black comic lovers rejoice! Encyclopedia of Black Comics is the ultimate resource." -Eye Candy, AFROPUNK
"The newly published Encyclopedia of Black Comics is something the world has never seen before." -Tanasia Kenney, Atlanta Black Star
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Spanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates in this masterful collection of twenty-five illustrious and moving essays on the power of the written word.
Throughout American history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden by law to learn to read. This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance.
Organized into three sections, the Peril, the Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition.
At times haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of America’s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and literature.
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A startling and eye-opening look into America's First Family, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge is the powerful story about a daring woman of "extraordinary grit." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital.
In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.
Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.
"A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling," (USA TODAY) historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits.
When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.
The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality - the black Chinese restaurant.
Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens - on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles - the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake."
Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.
Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident - the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins - he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A surprise New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race - collected by National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation - are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify." (USA TODAY)
Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers.
"An absolutely indispensable anthology," (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race shines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our current predicament, and imagines a better future.
Envisioned as a response to The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin's groundbreaking 1963 essay collection, these contemporary writers reflect on the past, present, and future of race in America. We've made significant progress in the fifty-odd years since Baldwin's essays were published, but America is a long and painful distance away from a "post-racial society" - a truth we must confront if we are to continue to work towards change.
Baldwin's "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about; The Fire This Time "seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward." (Vogue)
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
This extraordinary New York Times bestseller reexamines a pivotal event of the civil rights movement - the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till - "and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren't often enough asked to do with history: learn from it." (The Atlantic)
In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional.
Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves "the Emmett Till generation" launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till's lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history.
But what actually happened to Emmett Till - not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, The Blood of Emmett Till "unfolds like a movie" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), drawing on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Till's innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Michelle Obama is unlike any other First Lady in American history.
From her first moments on the public stage, she has challenged traditional American notions about what it means to be beautiful, to be strong, to be fashion-conscious, to be healthy, to be First Mom, to be a caretaker and hostess, and to be partner to the most powerful man in the world. What is remarkable is that, at 52, she is just getting started.
While many books have looked at Michelle Obama from a fashion perspective, no book has fully explored what she means to our culture. The Meaning of Michelle does just that, while offering a parting gift to a landmark moment in American history. In addition to a tribute to Michelle Obama, this book is also a rollicking, lively dinner party conversation about race, class, marriage, creativity, womanhood and what it means to be American today.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America's foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. It's Toni Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging
Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books: Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.
If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood.
She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Dana, a modern black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
In Kindred, Dana is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.
Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him.
Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
The powerful evocation of a childhood in Harlem that helped to galvanize the early days of the civil rights movement examines the deep consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic.
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement.
At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.
Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle... all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem.
Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed - and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A compelling portrait of the historic Barack Obama era, combining new and annotated essays from the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, includes the articles, "Fear of a Black President" and "The Case for Reparations" as well as two new pieces on the Obama administration and what is coming next.
"We were eight years in power" was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first white president."
But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period - and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation's old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective - the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy features Coates's iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including "Fear of a Black President," "The Case for Reparations," and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates's own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era.
We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Published in 2004, Barack Obama is the son of an African father and white American mother discussing his childhood in Hawaii, his struggle to find his identity as an African American, and his life accomplishments.
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American.
It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
Look back on the life of President Obama in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
The New Jim Crow argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race.
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is such a book.
Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."
By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control - relegating millions to a permanent second-class status - even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."
Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Living with his grandparents and toddler sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his tormented mother's addictions and his grandmother's terminal cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope. By the National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones.
In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds.
Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won't acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister's lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children's father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.
When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an unforgettable family story.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
