Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering

Sherman A. Jackson

In his controversial 1973 book, Is God a White Racist?, William R. Jones sharply criticized black theologians for their agnostic approach to black suffering, noting that the doctrine of an ominibenevolent God poses very significant problems for a perennially oppressed...

Dreams of Africa in Alabama

Sylviane A. Diouf

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans...

After Winter

John Edgar Tidwell , Steven C Tracy

John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy have brought together for the first time a book-length collection of critical and theoretical writings about Sterling A. Brown that recovers and reasserts his continuing importance for a contemporary audience. Exploring new...

Laughing Fit to Kill

Glenda Carpio

Reassessing the meanings of "black humor" and "dark satire," Laughing Fit to Kill illustrates how black comedians, writers, and artists have deftly deployed various modes of comedic "conjuring"--the absurd, the grotesque, and the strategic expression of racial...

Freedom Sounds

Ingrid Monson

An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and...

Becoming African in America

James Sidbury

The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as "African" but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development...

Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles

Janet L. Abu-Lughod

Harlem Renaissance

Nathan Irvin Huggins

A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with...

The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride

Julia C. Collins

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport,...

The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride

Julia C. Collins

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport,...

Steel Drivin' Man

Scott Reynolds Nelson

The ballad "John Henry" is the most recorded folk song in American history and John Henry--the mighty railroad man who could blast through rock faster than a steam drill--is a towering figure in our culture. In Steel Drivin' Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson recounts the...

Steel Drivin' Man

Scott Reynolds Nelson

The ballad "John Henry" is the most recorded folk song in American history and John Henry--the mighty railroad man who could blast through rock faster than a steam drill--is a towering figure in our culture. In Steel Drivin' Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson recounts the...

From the Kitchen to the Parlor

Lanita Jacobs-Huey

When is hair "just hair" and when is it not "just hair"? Documenting the politics of African American women's hair, this multi-sited linguistic ethnography explores everyday interaction in beauty parlors, Internet discussions, comedy clubs, and other contexts to...

Double Trouble

J. Phillip Thompson

J. Phillip Thompson III, an insider in the Dinkins administration, provides the first in-depth look at how the black mayors of America's major cities achieve social change. Black constituents naturally look to black mayors to effect great change for the poor, but the...

Teaching African American Religions

Carolyn M. Jones , Theodore Louis Trost

The variety and complexity of its traditions make African American religion one of the most difficult topics in religious studies to teach to undergraduates.The sheer scope of the material to be covered is daunting to instructors, many of whom are not experts in African...

To Make Our World Anew

Robin D. G. Kelley , Earl Lewis

The two volumes of Kelley and Lewis's To Make Our World Anew integrate the work of eleven leading historians into the most up-to-date and comprehensive account available of African American history, from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, right up...

Islam and the Blackamerican

Sherman A. Jackson

Sherman Jackson offers a trenchant examination of the career of Islam among the blacks of America. Jackson notes that no one has offered a convincing explanation of why Islam spread among Blackamericans (a coinage he explains and defends) but not among white Americans...

Righteous Riches

Milmon F. Harrison

Does God want us to be wealthy? Many people believe that God offers not only eternal joy in the hereafter but also material blessings in the here and now. Other Christians see this "prosperity theology," as nothing more than vulgar materialism, incompatible with...

The Politics of Public Housing

Rhonda Y. Williams

Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: "ghetto moms" or...

The Pursuit of Fairness

Terry H. Anderson

Affirmative action strikes at the heart of deeply held beliefs about employment and education, about the concepts of justice and fairness, and about the troubled history of race relations in America. Published on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, this...