This book provides the chance for young readers to learn about the death-defying attempts of black Americans to gain the inalienable rights promised in the Declaration of Independence.

"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear ... In [this book], Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth...

The story of John Grimes, a young man living in Harlem in the 1930's. His relationship with his strict preacher-father, Gabriel, who moved from the South to escape his past, is the central focus of this compelling drama.

"A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature. A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of twenty-two, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and '60s America. In this...

In these fourteen stories, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World explores the complexities of Black American lives in the nation's capital.
Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, bestselling author Edward P. Jones has filled this collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary...

When sixteen-year-old Bri, an aspiring rapper, pours her anger and frustration into her first song, she finds herself at the center of a controversy.

Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black, Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From "History"--A song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"--to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's...

"Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of Black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.
This edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.
Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling,...

"Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. A chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor. As the only Black person in the company, Darren reimagines...

When she discovers that big-headed rancher Jesse Pleasant has a softer side during a painfully awkward showing at a community date auction, former tech consultant Lily-Grace Leroux warms to the sparks flying between them, never dreaming that she could have her own happily ever after.