In this “thought-provoking and important” (Library Journal) analysis of state-sanctioned violence, Marc Lamont Hill carefully considers a string of high-profile deaths in America—Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others—and incidents of gross negligence by government, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Explains how years of desegregation and affirmative action have led to the revelation of four distinct African American groups who reflect unique political views and circumstances, in a report that also illuminates crucial modern debates on race and class.

Reveals how the slur has both reflected and spread bigotry in America over the last 400 years. Asim pinpoints Thomas Jefferson as the source of our enduring image: in a seminal but now obscure essay, he marshaled a welter of pseudo-science to define the stereotype of a shiftless child-man with huge appetites and stunted self control. Asim reveals how nineteenth-century "science" then colluded with popular culture to amplify this slander. What began as false generalizations became institutionalized in every corner of our society. Asim argues that even when uttered with the opposite intent by hipsters and hip-hop icons, using the slur helps keep blacks at the bottom of America's socio-economic ladder. But, he also shows, there is a place for this word in the mouths and on the pens of those who truly understand its twisted history. Only when we know its legacy can we loosen its grip.

Uprooting Racism explores the manifestations of racism in politics, work, community, and family life. It moves beyond the definition and unlearning of racism to address the many areas of privilege for white people and suggests ways for individuals and groups to challenge the structures of racism. Uprooting Racism's welcoming style helps readers look at how we learn racism, what effects it has on our lives, its costs and benefits to white people, and what we can do about it.

In this collection of twelve previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States.

Civil rights, labor, and community organizer Kahn provides a manual for community organizers based on his 45 years of experience in the field. The author, also a musician, shows today's organizers how to use a combination of history, songs, and stories. He also includes examples of creative community organizing that emphasize a innovative approach to activism, the strategies and tactics of successful organizing, and how organizers can deal personally with the demanding life of an activist. - Book News

Like Race Matters and Playing in the Dark, The House That Race Built is a cutting-edge work that confronts, honestly and passionately, the most critical issues facing American culture today along the fissure of race. In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today's most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society

Black Stats-- a comprehensive guide filled with contemporary facts and figures on African Americans-- is an essential reference for anyone attempting to fathom the complex state of our nation. With fascinating and often surprising information on everything from incarceration rates, lending practices, and the arts to marriage, voting habits, and green jobs, the contextualized material in this book will better attune readers to telling trends while challenging commonly held, yet often misguided, perceptions.

For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Great American City argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live.

To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Robert J. Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade’s research in Chicago combined with his own unique personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, and immigration.

The news is everywhere. We can't stop constantly checking it on our computes, but what is this doing to our minds? We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton, but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives. Here, de Botton takes twenty-five archetypal news stories--including an airplane crash, a murder, a celebrity interview and a political scandal--and submits them to unusually intense analysis with a view to helping us navigate our news-soaked age. He raises such questions as: Why are disaster stories often so uplifting? What makes the love lives of celebrities so interesting? Why do we enjoy watching politicians being brought down? Why are upheavals in far-off lands often so boring? De Botton has written the ultimate guide for our frenzied era, certain to bring calm, understanding and a measure of sanity to our daily (perhaps even hourly) interactions with the news machine.

In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice--the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights.

The methodology of the late Paulo Freire, once considered such a threat to the established order that he was "invited" to leave his native Brazil, has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm." "With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

In White Like Me, Tim Wise offers a highly personal examination of the ways in which racial privilege shapes the lives of most white Americans, overtly racist or not, to the detriment of people of color, themselves, and society. The book shows the breadth and depth of the phenomenon within institutions such as education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and healthcare. By critically assessing the magnitude of racial privilege and its enormous costs, Wise provides a rich memoir that will inspire activists, educators, or anyone interested in understanding the way that race continues to shape the experiences of people in the U.S. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and scholarly, analytical and accessible.

Witnessing Whiteness invites educators to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white educators toward ineffective teaching pedagogy and poor relationships with students and colleagues of color.

Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that is more relevant than ever in the age of the Tea Party and the first black president. In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney López offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich, give corporations control over financial markets, and aggressively curtail social services. White voters, convinced by powerful interests that minorities are their true enemies, fail to see the connection between the political agendas they support and the surging wealth inequality that takes an increasing toll on their lives.

Using in-depth interviews with participants and residents, Watson brilliantly captures the tottering legacy of Jim Crow in Mississippi, while vividly portraying: the chaos that brought such national figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pete Seeger to the state, the courageous black citizens and Northern volunteers who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life.

Black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob took him from jail and burned him alive. The author places Cleo in the context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Summer murders, traces the events surrounding the KKK lynching of three young civil rights activists who were trying to register African Americans for the vote.
In June of 1964, three idealistic young men (one black and two white) were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. They were trying to register African Americans to vote as part of the Freedom Summer effort to bring democracy to the South. Their disappearance and murder caused a national uproar and was one of the most significant incidents of the Civil Rights Movement, and contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mitchell takes a comprehensive look at the brutal murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, through to the conviction in 2005 of mastermind Edgar Ray Killen.

Argues that 1965, not 1968, was the most transformative year of the 1960s, discussing attacks on civil rights demonstrators, increased African American militancy, the Watts riots, anti-war protests, and a growing national pessimism.

James Baldwin’s rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders―including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith―and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma march.

The men who came together to found the independent United States either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. George Washington, hero of the Revolution, was the master of several hundred slaves. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, owned more than 200 men, women, and children while eloquently defending the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this classic work, originally published in 1976, through a meticulous history of Virginia from its earliest settlement through the seventeenth century boom in tobacco, the gradual replacement of servitude with slavery, and the rise of republican ideology, historian Morgan reveals the deep and interlocking relationship between these seemingly contradictory ideas.

"The story behind the landmark 1948 Supreme Court decision, Shelley vs. Kraemer, which struck down racially-based housing restrictions and opened the door to fair housing regulations in the United States.

Waking from the Dream is a revealing and resonant look at civil rights after King as well as King's place in American memory. It illuminates a time, explores a cause, and explains how a movement labored to overcome the loss of its leader.

In September 1957 nine black children tried to integrate Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School in accordance with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Claiming he was acting to keep the peace, Gov. Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep them out of the school. After a lengthy standoff, President Eisenhower called in the 101st Airborne and reluctantly, slowly, but forcibly began to integrate the school. The standoff became a rallying cry for Southern segregationists and a marker of the country's shame.Turn Away Thy Son, told from the point of view of sixteen key participants, brings the nine students, their tormentors, the school administration, the governor, and the press to vivid life.

Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history.

Leave now, or die! From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Texas frontier, words like these have echoed through more than a century of American history. The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster--a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation. We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansingabove and below the Mason-Dixon line--has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." The expulsions were swift-in many cases, it took no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day. Based on nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. In this groundbreaking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has rewritten American history as we know it.

The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. New details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. This book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.

A contribution to the history of American violence. It focuses on the bedrock issues of race and class, analysising the quick of urban-industrial life in the early twentieth century.

A collection of stories from African American history that exemplifies success in the face of great adversity. This unique graphic anthology offers historical and cultural commentary on nine uncelebrated heroes whose stories are not often found in history books. Among the stories included are: Henry 'Box' Brown, who escaped from slavery by mailing himself to Philadelphia; Alexander Crummel and the Noyes Academy, the first integrated school in America, established in the 1830s; Marshall 'Major' Taylor, a.k.a. the Black Cyclone, the first Black champion in any sport; and Bass Reeves, the most successful lawman in the Old West. Written and illustrated by Joel Christian Gill, the diverse art beautifully captures the spirit of each remarkable individual and opens a window into an important part of American history.

An invaluable examination of the history of race and politics in the Northeast, All Eyes Are Upon Us offers a provocative account of the region’s troubled roots in segregation and its promising future in politicians from Deval Patrick to Barack Obama.

In the early twentieth century, Marcus Garvey sowed the seeds of a new black pride and determination. Attacked by the black intelligentsia and ridiculed by the white press, this Jamaican immigrant astonished all with his black nationalist rhetoric. In just four years, he built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest and most powerful all-black organization the nation had ever seen. With hundreds of branches, throughout the United States, the UNIA represented Garvey's greatest accomplishment and, ironically, the source of his public disgrace. Black Moses brings this controversial figure to life and recovers the significance of his life and work.

A history of northern racial exclusion demonstrates the pervasiveness of racism throughout the entire United States, analyzing how sundown towns in northern states participated in racially oppressive practices and victimized black citizens with frequently violent attacks well into the late twentieth century.

In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Its impact was enormous. "There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition," remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it.