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. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

    Within days, five black and Latino teenagers confess to her rape and beating. In a city where urban crime is at a high and violence is frequent, the ensuing media frenzy and hysterical public reaction is extraordinary. The young men are tried as adults and convicted of rape, despite the fact that the teens quickly recant their inconsistent and inaccurate confessions and that no DNA tests or eyewitness accounts tie any of them to the victim. They serve their complete sentences before another man, serial rapist Matias Reyes, confesses to the crime and is connected to it by DNA testing.Intertwining the stories of these five young men, the police officers, the district attorneys, the victim, and Matias Reyes, Sarah Burns unravels the forces that made both the crime and its prosecution possible. Most dramatically, she gives us a portrait of a city already beset by violence and deepening rifts between races and classes, whose law enforcement, government, social institutions, and media were undermining the very rights of the individuals they were designed to safeguard and protect.

    I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night..."

    Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

    Misrepresented in the media as a black parallel to the Hell's Angels, portrayed as everything from a vicious street gang to quasi- Islamic revolutionaries, The Five Percenters are a movement that began as a breakaway sect from the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960s Harlem and went on to impact the formation of hip-hop. References to Five Percent language and ideas are found in the lyrics of wide-ranging artists, such as Nas, Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, and even Jay-Z. The Five Percenters are denounced by white America as racists, and orthodox Islam as heretics, for teaching that the black man is Allah. Michael Muhammad Knight ("the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature" -The Guardian) has engaged this culture as both white and Muslim; and over the course of his relationship with The Five Percenters, his personal position changed from that of an outsider to an accepted participant with his own initiatory name (Azreal Wisdom). This has given him an intimate perch from which to understand and examine the controversial doctrines of this influential movement. In "Why I Am a Five Percenter," Knight strips away years of sensationalism to offer a serious encounter with Five Percenter thought. Encoded within Five Percent culture is a profound critique of organized religion, from which the movement derives its name: Only Five Percent can act as "poor righteous teachers" against the evil Ten Percent, the power structure which uses religion to deceive the Eighty- Five Percent, the "deaf, dumb, and blind" masses. Questioning his own relationship to the Five Percent, Knight directly confronts the community's most difficult teachings. In "Why I Am a Five Percenter," Knight not only illuminates a thought system that must appear bizarre to outsiders, but he also brilliantly dissects the very issues of"insiders" and "outsiders," territory and ownership, as they relate to religion and privilege, and to our conditioned ideas about race.

    Loewen, exposes the secret communities and hotbeds of racial injustice that sprung up throughout the twentieth century unnoticed, forcing us to reexamine race relations in the United States.In this groundbreaking work, bestselling sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks could not live there—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. These towns used everything from legal formalities to violence to create homogenous Caucasian communities—and their existence has gone unexamined until now. For the first time, Loewen takes a long, hard look at the history, sociology, and continued existence of these towns, contributing an essential new chapter to the study of American race relations.Sundown Towns combines personal narrative, history, and analysis to create a readable picture of this previously unknown American institution all written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness.

    At the heart of this cultural explosion was Harlem, where everything was changing, including the influential denizens who helped define it. Among these were a little-known group of white women who for decades have been relegated to the shadows of history. In this groundbreaking cultural biography, esteemed scholar Carla Kaplan offers a captivating and full-blooded portrait of this band of independent-minded and spirited white women collectively referred to as "Miss Anne."Sexualized and sensationalized in the white press--often portrayed as monstrous or insane--Miss Anne was sometimes derided in black literature and among the Harlem community as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for "exotic" dancers and "hot" jazz, a white woman who embraced life on West 125th Street found herself ostracized. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women--many from New York's highest social echelons, many of them Jewish--who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. In this superb blend of social history and biography, illustrated with black-and-white photos and two eight-page color inserts, Kaplan illuminates the myriad faces of Miss Anne, explores her motivations, and makes clear her often misunderstood choices. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan's formidable history remaps the landscape of the 1920s and alters our perception of this historical moment.

    In "Cinderella & Company," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Manuela Hoelterhoff takes us on a two-year trip on the circuit with Cecilia Bartoli, the young mezzo-soprano who has captured an adoring public around the world. Here too are tantalizing glimpses of divinities large and small: Kathleen Battle's famously chilly limousine ride; Placido Domingo flying through three time zones to step into the boots of an ailing Otello; Luciano Pavarotti aiming for high C in his twilight years. And we meet the present players in Bartoli's world: Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, a.k.a. the Love Couple; Jane Eaglen, the Wagnerian web potato monitoring her cyberspace fan mail; the appealing soprano Renee Fleming, finally on the brink of stardom.

    In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America.White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, "How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?" and "What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be 'anti-racist'?"Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents' explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves.By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts--from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative--this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.

    The rocker settled in Berlin, where he would make his “Berlin Trilogy”—the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger, which are now considered some of the most critically acclaimed and innovative of the late twentieth century. But Bowie’s time in Berlin was about more than producing new music. As Tobias Rüther describes in this fascinating tale of Bowie’s Berlin years, the musician traveled to West Berlin—the capital of his childhood dreams and the city of Expressionism—to repair his body and mind from the devastation of drug addiction, delusions, and mania.             Painting a vivid picture of Bowie’s life in the Schöneberg area of the city, Rüther describes the artist’s friendships and collaborations with his roommate, Iggy Pop, as well as Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Rüther illustrates Bowie’s return to painting, days cycling to the Die Brücke museum, and his exploration of the city’s nightlife, both the wild side and the gay scene. In West Berlin, Bowie also met singer and actress Romy Haag; came to know Hansa Studios, where he would record Low and Heroes; and even landed the part of a Prussian aristocrat in Just a Gigolo, starring alongside Marlene Dietrich. Eventually Rüther uses Bowie and his explorations of the cultural and historical undercurrents of West Berlin to examine the city itself: divided, caught in the Cold War, and how it began to redefine itself as a cultural metropolis, turning to the arts to start a new history. Tying in with an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in September, 2014, Heroes tells the fascinating story of how the music of the future arose from the spirit of the past. It is an unforgettable look at one of the world’s most renowned musicians in one of its most inspiring cities.

    She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

    L. King’s On the Down Low, Hung brings a topic previously discussed only in intimate settings out into the open. In a brilliant, multilayered look at the pervasive belief that African American men are prodigiously endowed, Scott Poulson-Bryant interweaves his own experiences as a black man in America with witty analyses of how black male sexuality is expressed in books, film, television, sports, and pornography.“Hung” is a double entendre, referring not only to penis size but to the fact that black men were once literally hung from trees, often for their perceived sexual prowess and the supposed risk it posed to white women. As a poignant reminder, he begins his book with a letter to Emmett Till, the teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in the mid-1950s for whistling at a white woman.For Poulson-Bryant and other men of his generation, society’s deep-seated obsession with the sexual powers of black men has had an enormous, if often deceptive, influence on how they perceive themselves and on the assumptions made by others. His tales of his sexual encounters with both sexes, along with anecdotes about the lives of various friends and colleagues, are wryly and at times shockingly revealing. Enduring racial perceptions have shaped popular culture as well, and Poulson-Bryant offers a thorough, thought-provoking look at media-created images of the “Well-Hung Black Male.” He deftly deconstructs movies like Mandingo and Shaft, articles in the popular press, and edgy works like Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, while also providing distinctive profiles of icons like porn star Lexington Steele and rapper L.L. Cool J.A scintillating mixture of memoir and cultural commentary, Hung is the first and only book to take on phallic fixation and uncover what lies below. Readers may be scandalized, but they’ll also have plenty to ponder about America’s views on how black men measure up.

    . . extraordinarily far-reaching. . . . highly accessible."-Notes"No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom."-Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story"This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner."-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University"[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories."-African American ReviewA Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On."Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers.Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.

    It celebrates a unifying heritage and illustrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood and the strong links that endure from generation to generation as well as the common obstacles that female writers of colour continue to face as they negotiate issues of race, gender and class.A glorious portrayal of the richness, magnitude and range of the singular and combined accomplishments of these women, New Daughters of Africa also testifies to a wealth of genres: autobiography, memoirs, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humour, politics, journalism, essays and speeches.It showcases key figures and popular contemporaries, as well as overlooked historical authors and today’s new and emerging writers. Amongst the 200 contributors are: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Patience Agbabi, Sefi Atta, Ayesha Harruna Attah, Malorie Blackman, Tanella Boni, Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo, Aminatta Forna, Danielle Legros Georges, Bonnie Greer, Andrea Levy, Imbolo Mbue, Yewande Omotoso, Nawal El Saadawi, Taiye Selasi, Warsan Shire, Zadie Smith and Andrea Stuart.A unique and seminal anthology, New Daughters of Africa represents the global sweep, diversity and extraordinary literary achievements of Black women writers whose voices, despite on going discussions, remain under-represented and underrated.

    An exploration of how Edmund Perry, a 17 year old black honors student from Harlem, was killed soon after graduation by a young white plain clothes policeman in an alleged mugging attempt.