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How to Fight Racism Young Reader's Edition: A Guide to Standing Up for Racial Justice

Kids deal with racism and social justice issues every day; give them the tools to effectively fight injustices using Christian principles and practical tools. In this adaptation of How to Fight Racism, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Jemar Tisby helps young readers ages 8-12 understand how everyday prejudice affects them, what they can do to create social change, how to maintain an anti-racist mindset, and make a positive difference in the world.
Racism is pervasive in today's world, and in the wake of protests and a call for change, many kids are eager to confront it but aren’t always sure how. Jemar Tisby, author of How to Fight Racism and The Color of Compromise, believes we need to move beyond mere discussions?about?racism and begin equipping young people with the practical tools to fight against it.
In How to Fight Racism Young Reader’s Edition, Dr. Tisby uses history to explore how racism has affected America since before its founding and how it’s continued to grow, as well as examines how true social justice is rooted in the Christian faith. In a format that provides kids with a handbook for pursuing racial justice, readers ages 8-12 will discover:
hands-on suggestions and real-world examples of?change they can put into action
practical ideas for confronting racism and social injustice in their?everyday lives, and how they can use Christian values to change the narrative around race
the ARC of racial justice—Awareness, Connection, and?Relationships—that help form an anti-racist mindset
ways to evaluate their actions and promote biblical principles
Throughout, kids will learn how to ask questions of themselves and their communities as they stand up to racism in all its forms. This book is for anyone who believes it is time to courageously confront the racism we see in our society today.
How to Fight Racism Young Reader’s Edition:
Is ideal for any young person wanting to make a?difference in today’s world
Can be used by families and church groups to start?meaningful conversations with kids
Provides practical tools and advice for how to deal with social justice and racism
Is written at a level kids in grades 4 through 6 and?beyond can understand
Can be used in a small group setting to develop discussions of diversity, racism, social justice, and more
  • Age Group: Young Readers
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The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance

The Black History You Never Knew: Uncovering Unsung Heroes in the Struggle for Racial Justice.
The Spirit of Justice reveals the stories of the people who fought against racism and agitated for justice—and what we can learn from their example, their suffering, their methods, and their hope.
How is it that people still work for change after continuously seeing the worst of humanity and experiencing the most demoralizing setbacks? What keeps them going? It is that spirit of justice that rises up "like a war horse," as Myrlie Evers-Williams famously said. It is a sense in the hearts of people who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
In this book, award-winning author Jemar Tisby will open your eyes to the "pattern of endurance" in the centuries-long struggle for Black freedom in America. Through a historical survey of the nation from its founding to the present day, this book gives real-world examples of people who opposed racism, how they did it, what it cost, and what they gained for themselves and others.
For those who were galvanized by Tisby's call to action in his acclaimed The Color of Compromise, this book will inspire you to see past the complicity of the church and gain the determination to join the fight for racial justice, no matter the cost.
As Tisby writes, "The Spirit of justice is always at work to inspire followers of Christ to undertake acts of liberation and bear witness to the good news of their savior."
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How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice

How do we effectively confront racial injustice? We need to move beyond talking about racism and start equipping ourselves to fight against it.
In this follow-up to the New York Times Bestseller the Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby offers an array of actionable items to confront racism. How to Fight Racism introduces a simple framework—the A.R.C. Of Racial Justice—that teaches readers to consistently interrogate their own actions and maintain a consistent posture of anti-racist behavior.
The A.R.C. Of Racial Justice is a clear model for how to think about race in productive ways:
Awareness: educate yourself by studying history, exploring your personal narrative, and grasping what God says about the dignity of the human person.
Relationships: understand the spiritual dimension of race relations and how authentic connections make reconciliation real and motivate you to act.
Commitment: consistently fight systemic racism and work for racial justice by orienting your life to it.
Now with a new preface and additional content, Tisby offers practical tools for following this model and suggests that by applying these principles, we can help dismantle a social hierarchy long stratified by skin color. He encourages rejection passivity and active participation in the struggle for human dignity. There is hope for transforming our nation and the world, and you can be part of the solution.
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The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

An acclaimed, timely narrative of how people of faith have historically--up to the present day--worked against racial justice. And a call for urgent action by all Christians today in response.
The Color of Compromise is both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don't know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. You will be guided in thinking through concrete solutions for improved race relations and a racially inclusive church.
The Color of Compromise:
Takes you on a historical, sociological, and religious journey: from America's early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War
Covers the tragedy of Jim Crow laws, the victories of the Civil Rights era, and the strides of today's Black Lives Matter movement
Reveals the cultural and institutional tables we have to flip in order to bring about meaningful integration
Charts a path forward to replace established patterns and systems of complicity with bold, courageous, immediate action
Is a perfect book for pastors and other faith leaders, students, non-students, book clubs, small group studies, history lovers, and all lifelong learners
The Color of Compromise is not a call to shame or a platform to blame white evangelical Christians. It is a call from a place of love and desire to fight for a more racially unified church that no longer compromises what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality. A call that challenges black and white Christians alike to standup now and begin implementing the concrete ways Tisby outlines, all for a more equitable and inclusive environment among God's people. Starting today.
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Caste (Adapted for Young Adults)

In this young adult adaptation of the Oprah Book Club selection and New York Times bestselling nonfiction work, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson explores the unspoken hierarchies that divide us across lines of race and class. Revealing and timely, this work will speak to young people who are engaged more than ever with the world around them, or to anyone who believes in a more just existence for all.
Readers will be fascinated by this young adult adaptation of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction work as they follow masterful narratives about real people that reveal an insidious phenomenon in the United States: a hidden caste system. Caste is not only about race or class; it is about power—which groups have it and which do not. Isabel Wilkerson explores historical social hierarchies, including those in India and Nazi Germany, and explains how perpetuating these rankings dehumanizes vast sections of society. Once we learn the reasons behind caste and see the often heartbreaking effects, Wilkerson says, we can bridge the divides and make way for an inclusive future where we are all equal.
  • Age Group: Young Adult
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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson).
Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods.
A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
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Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860

Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, this authoritative study describes the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. It reveals how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom and how some free Blacks purchased slaves for their own use. The book provides a fresh perspective on slavery in the antebellum South and underscores the importance of African Americans in the history of American slavery.
The book also paints a picture of the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks, and between Black and white slaveowners. It illuminates the motivations behind African-American slaveholding–including attempts to create or maintain independence, to accumulate wealth, and to protect family members–and sheds light on the harsh realities of slavery for both Black masters and Black slaves.
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent

"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not."
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
Netflix produced a film adaptation of the book, titled Origin and directed by Ava DuVernay. The film, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga and Niecy Nash-Betts, received generally favorable reviews.
There is a young adult adaptation of this book.
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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.
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Aya

Ivory Coast, 1978. Family and friends gather at Aya's house every evening to watch the country's first television ad campaign promoting the fortifying effects of Solibra, "the strong man's beer." It's a golden time, and the nation, too—an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa—seems fueled by something wondrous.
Who's to know that the Ivorian miracle is nearing its end? In the sun-warmed streets of working-class Yopougon, aka Yop City, holidays are around the corner, the open-air bars and discos are starting to fill up, and trouble of a different kind is about to raise eyebrows. At night, an empty table in the market square under the stars is all the privacy young lovers can hope for, and what happens there is soon everybody's business.
Aya tells the story of its nineteen-year-old heroine, the studious and clear-sighted Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It's a breezy and wryly funny account of the desire for joy and freedom, and of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City. An unpretentious and gently humorous story of an Africa we rarely see-spirited, hopeful, and resilient—Aya won the 2006 award for Best First Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Clément Oubrerie's warm colors and energetic, playful lines connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet's vibrant writing.
Aya is a captivating, colourful and hugely entertaining portrayal of an Africa we rarely see, spirited and resilient, and full of the sounds, sights and smells of a prosperous town and its varied inhabitants.
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African women, Pan-Africanism and African renaissance

Over the last 50 years and more, considerable progress has been achieved for women in Africa, thanks in no small part to the Pan-African Women’s Organization (PAWO). Nevertheless, the results are mixed and there is still much to be done to secure full recognition of women’s rights, health issues and political and social participation. Women’s poverty is a persisting fact of life. More must be done to help people to understand the hope and the potential that women hold for Africa’s future in terms of growth, inclusion and social justice.UNESCO works unrelentingly to promote education, science and culture – resources that are essential to the full development of the individual and are levers for sustainable development. PAWO’s work is wholly consistent with our Organization’s two overarching priorities: Africa and gender equality. These two priorities are inseparable. The continent is undergoing a renaissance, with women at the forefront of that process. They are playing a pioneering role in the pan-African movement, by harnessing their creativity and dedication to serve peace, justice and the well-being of their families, their communities and their country. Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world, and it is no coincidence that most of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world today are in Africa. It is in Africa that gender parity in politics is spreading fastest, and the highest percentage of the world’s women parliamentarians is in Senegal, Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa. All of these women have called for resources to enable them to act, and we must support them, for everyone’s sake.
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The St. Louis American

The St. Louis American is a weekly newspaper serving the African-American community of St. Louis, Missouri.
St. Louis' only African American newspaper continuously published since 1928, and the longest continuously published weekly newspaper in the St. Louis area, The St. Louis American newspaper has emerged as the single largest weekly newspaper in the entire state of Missouri.
The St. Louis American was founded by Judge Nathan B. Young Jr and several African American businessmen, including Homer G. Phillips. At the time, the American was an eight-page "paid" tabloid, with a circulation of just over 2,000. In came Nathaniel Sweets less than a year later. Sweets helped keep the American alive for more than 45 years as an owner-publisher. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the American continued to gain respect and readership,[citation needed] through its venerable editor Bennie G. Rodgers, who worked for the paper for more than 50 years, and is still known as the "dean of black journalism in St. Louis".
Current publisher Donald M. Suggs took the reins of The St. Louis American in the early 1980s. When Suggs took over the newspaper, it had a circulation of approximately 4,400. His first major change: the paper had to move from being a limited-circulation paid newspaper to a widely circulated free weekly newspaper to effectively and efficiently reach the rapidly growing (and more broadly dispersing) African American population in the St. Louis area.
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The Chicago Defender

The Chicago Defender is a Chicago-based online African-American newspaper. It was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and was once considered the "most important" newspaper of its kind. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim Crow-era violence and urged black people in the American South to settle in the north in what became the Great Migration. Abbott worked out an informal distribution system with Pullman porters who surreptitiously (and sometimes against southern state laws and mores) took his paper by rail far beyond Chicago, especially to African American readers in the southern United States. Under his nephew and chosen successor, John H. Sengstacke, the paper dealt with racial segregation in the United States, especially in the U.S. military, during World War II. Copies of the paper were passed along in communities, and it is estimated that at its most successful, each copy was read by four to five people.
In 1919–1922, the Defender attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes; from the 1940s through 1960s, Hughes wrote an opinion column for the paper. Washington, D.C., and international correspondent Ethel Payne, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, author Willard Motley, music critic Dave Peyton, journalists Ida B. Wells, L. Alex Wilson and Louis Lomax wrote for the paper at different times. During the height of the civil rights movement era, it was published as The Chicago Daily Defender, a daily newspaper, beginning in 1956. It became a weekly paper again in 2008.
Jim Crow Era and The Great Migration
The Chicago Defender's editor and founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a major role in influencing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North by means of strong, moralistic rhetoric in his editorials and political cartoons, the promotion of Chicago as a destination, and the advertisement of successful black individuals as inspiration for blacks in the South. The rhetoric and art exhibited in the Defender demanded equality of the races and promoted a northern migration. Abbott published articles that were exposés of southern crimes against blacks. The Defender consistently published articles describing lynchings in the South, with vivid descriptions of gore and the victims' deaths. Lynchings were at a peak at the turn of the century, in the period when southern state legislatures passed new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise most blacks and exclude them from the political system. Legislatures dominated by conservative white Democrats established racial segregation and Jim Crow.
Abbott openly blamed the lynching violence on the white mobs who were typically involved, forcing readers to accept that these crimes were "systematic and unremitting". The newspaper's intense focus on these injustices implicitly laid the groundwork upon which Abbott would build his explicit critiques of society. At the same time, the NAACP was publicizing the toll of lynching at its offices in New York City.
The art in the Defender, particularly its political cartoons by Jay Jackson and others, explicitly addressed race issues and advocated northern migration of blacks.
After the movement of southern blacks northward became a quantifiable phenomenon, the Defender took a particular interest in sensationalizing migratory stories, often on the front page. Abbott positioned his paper as a primary influence of these movements before historians would, for he used the Defender to initiate and advertise a "Great Northern Drive" day, set for May 15, 1917. The movement to northern and midwestern cities, and to the West Coast at the time of World War I, became known as the Great Migration, in which 1.5 million blacks moved out of the rural South in early 20th century years up to 1940, and another 5 million left towns and rural areas from 1940 to 1970.
Abbott used the Defender to promote Chicago as an attractive destination for southern blacks. Abbott presented Chicago as a promised-land with abundant jobs, as he included advertisements "clearly aimed at southerners," that called for massive numbers of workers wanted in factory positions. The Defender was filled with advertisements for desirable commodities, beauty products and technological devices. Abbott's paper was the first black newspaper to incorporate a full entertainment section. Chicago was portrayed as a lively city where blacks commonly went to the theaters, ate out at fancy restaurants, attended sports events, including "cheering for the American Black Giants, black America's favorite baseball team", and could dance all night in the hottest night clubs.
The Defender featured letters and poetry submitted by successful recent migrants; these writings "served as representative anecdotes, supplying readers with prototype examples ... that characterized the migration campaign". To supplement these first-person accounts, Abbott often published small features on successful blacks in Chicago. The African American mentalist Princess Mysteria had from 1920 to her death in 1930 a weekly column on the Defender, called "Advice to the Wise and Otherwise."
In 1923, Abbott and editor Lucius Harper created the Bud Billiken Club for black children through the "Junior Defender" page of the paper. The club encouraged the children's proper development, and reading The Defender. In 1929, the organization began the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which is still held annually in Chicago in early August. In the 1950s, under Sengstacke's direction, the Bud Billiken Parade expanded and emerged as the largest single event in Chicago. Today, it attracts more than one million attendees with more than 25 million television viewers, making it one of the largest parades in the country.
In 1928, for the first time, The Defender refused to endorse a Republican Party presidential candidate. Throughout the election it ran a series of articles critical of the party, its failures to advance black civil rights, and what it saw as Republican's embrace or acquiescence in segregationism, party support in a revitalized Ku Klux Klan, and the Republican's Lily White Movement. The paper's final pre-election editorial read in part: “We want justice in America and we mean to get it. If 50 years of support to the Republican Party doesn’t get us justice, then we must of necessity shift our allegiance to new quarters.” For a variety of reasons, in the coming years, black support for the Republican Party fell rapidly.
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The Philadelphia Tribune

The Philadelphia Tribune is the oldest continuously published African-American newspaper in the United States.
The paper began in 1884 when Christopher J. Perry published its first copy. Throughout its history, The Philadelphia Tribune has been committed to the social, political, and economic advancement of African Americans in the Greater Philadelphia region. During a time when African Americans struggled for equality, the Tribune acted as the "Voice of the black community" for Philadelphia. Historian V. P. Franklin asserted that the Tribune "was (and is) an important Afro-American cultural institution that embodied the predominant cultural values of upper, middle, and lower class Black Philadelphians."
When the Tribune began publication in 1884, it was a weekly, one-page paper, publishing from 725 Sansom Street. Despite the challenges black businesses faced during the late nineteenth century, especially in journalism, the Tribune enjoyed unusual success during its early years, and it averaged 3,225 copies weekly by 1887. In 1891, Perry and the Tribune received national recognition when Garland Penn, a prominent advocate for African-American journalism, praised the Philadelphia newspaper in his book The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. In his book, Penn complimented the Tribune's consistency and reliability. However, the Tribune was not the only African-American newspaper circulating in Philadelphia at the time. The Tribune competed against other African-American newspapers during its first few decades, such as The Philadelphia Standard Echo, The Philadelphia Sentinel, The Philadelphia Defender, and The Courant. But by 1900, the Tribune became the leading voice of Black Philadelphia, and W. E. B. Du Bois referred to it as "the chief news-sheet" in the city.
In the early 21st century, the paper is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It publishes on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday. The Philadelphia Tribune also publishes the Tribune Magazine, Entertainment Now, Sojourner, The Learning Key, and The Sunday Tribune. The Tribune serves the Philadelphia–Camden Metro Area, as well as Chester. The Tribune has received the John B. Russwurm award as "Best Newspaper" in the country seven times since 1995.
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The Captive

Kofi, the prince of a West African village, is horrified when he is betrayed, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in Massachusetts, in a story In a novel based on a true story of an African-born slave in the early nineteenth century, Kofi Kwame Paul's extraordinary life extends from his native village, to a New England town, and back to Africa.
The story opens in 1788 in the Ashanti (Asante) Empire. The Empire at this time included most of present day Ghana, a country in West Africa. The Asante Nation dates back to the 1670’s and the first Asante King, Osei Tutu who built the capital, Kumasi and began the legend of the Golden Stool. The great god Nyame sent down the Golden Stool, symbolizing the unification of the nation and the soul of the people. Osei Tutu was a strong leader who joined the various clans and kingships to form the empire.
Known for their production of gold and finely crafted jewelry, furniture, and beautifully woven cloth called kente, the various people and cultures who comprised the empire had been traders and skilled crafts men and women since the 14th and 15th centuries. Because of the spread of the European slave trade, the Asante’s were able to trade slaves for guns, making them even more powerful.
While slavery was practiced among the Asantes it was different from the slave trade conducted by Europeans and Americans. The Asantes enslaved people as a punishment for crime or the payment of a debt. Slaves were taken captive in war and were often integrated into the society of their captors. Therefore, Oppong, in my story is betrothed to Kofi’s sister. He is considered to be a member of the family.Those slaves captured and sold to Europeans would make the dreadful trip across the Atlantic to plantations and farms in the Caribbean and in America, never to see their homelands again.
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Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.
Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.
The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.
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Gold of Our Fathers

Darko Dawson, Chief Inspector in the Ghana police service, returns in this atmospheric crime series often compared to Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels.
Darko Dawson has just been promoted to Chief Inspector in the Ghana Police Service—the promotion even comes with a (rather modest) salary bump. But he doesn’t have long to celebrate because his new boss is transferring him from Accra, Ghana’s capital, out to remote Obuasi in the Ashanti region, an area now notorious for the illegal exploitation of its gold mines.
When Dawson arrives at the Obuasi headquarters, he finds it in complete disarray. The office is a mess of uncatalogued evidence and cold case files, morale is low, and discipline among officers is lax. On only his second day on the job, the body of a Chinese mine owner is unearthed in his own gold quarry. As Dawson investigates the case, he quickly learns how dangerous it is to pursue justice in this kingdom of illegal gold mines, where the worst offenders have so much money they have no fear of the law.
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The Hairdresser of Harare: A Novel

In this delicious and devastating first novel, which The Guardian named one of its ten best contemporary African books, Caine Prize finalist Tendai Huchu (The Maestro, the Magistrate, and the Mathematician) portrays the heart of contemporary Zimbabwean society with humor and grace. Vimbai is the best hairdresser in Mrs. Khumalo’s salon, and she is secure in her status until the handsome, smooth-talking Dumisani shows up one day for work. Despite her resistance, the two become friends, and eventually, Vimbai becomes Dumisani’s landlady. He is as charming as he is deft with the scissors, and Vimbai finds that he means more and more to her. Yet, by novel’s end, the pair’s deepening friendship―used or embraced by Dumisani and Vimbai with different futures in mind―collapses in unexpected brutality. The novel is an acute portrayal of a rapidly changing Zimbabwe. In addition to Vimbai and Dumisani’s personal development, the book shows us how social concerns shape the lives of everyday people.
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Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions

New Orleans is an iconic city, which was once located at the crossroads of early America and the Atlantic World. New Orleans became a major American metropolis as its slave population exploded; in the early nineteenth century, slaves made up one third of the urban population. In contrast to our typical understanding of rural, localized, isolated bondage in the emergent Deep South, daily experiences of slavery in New Orleans were global, interconnected, and transient. Slavery's Metropolis uses slave circulations through New Orleans between 1791 and 1825 to map the social and cultural history of enslaved men and women and the rapidly shifting city, nation, and world in which they lived. Investigating emigration from the Caribbean to Louisiana during the Haitian Revolution, commodity flows across urban-rural divides, multiracial amusement places, the local jail, and freedom-seeking migrations to Trinidad following the War of 1812, it remaps the history of slavery in modern urban society.
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Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City

Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Few studies since have been able to match its scope and magnitude, offering one of the most comprehensive looks at black life in America. Based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, it is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago’s South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s. Its findings offer a comprehensive analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the first half of the twentieth century. It offers a dizzying and dynamic world filled with captivating people and startling revelations.
A new foreword from sociologist Mary Pattillo places the study in modern context, updating the story with the current state of black communities in Chicago and the larger United States and exploring what this means for the future. As the country continues to struggle with race and our treatment of black lives, Black Metropolis continues to be a powerful contribution to the conversation.
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Behold the Dreamers: A Novel

A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream—the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.
However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.
When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.
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Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

From critically acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd comes an eloquent profile of one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century—Zora Neale Hurston.
A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother, and her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a crucial part of the modern literary canon.
Wrapped in Rainbows, the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in more than twenty-five years, illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of an extraordinary life. Acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston’s history—her youth in the country’s first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston’s work in her time but also offers riveting implications for our own.
Khamisi
Khamisi

Barracoon: Adapted for Young Readers: The Story of the Last Black Cargo

In the first middle grade offering from Zora Neale Hurston and Ibram X. Kendi, young readers are introduced to the remarkable and true-life story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Atlantic human trade, in an adaptation of the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed Barracoon.
This is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself.
Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America to be enslaved, eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis was then the only person alive to tell the story of his capture and bondage—fifty years after the Atlantic human trade was outlawed in the United States. Cudjo shared his firsthand account with legendary folklorist, anthropologist, and writer Zora Neale Hurston.
Adapted with care and delivered with age-appropriate historical context by award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi, Cudjo’s incredible story is now available for young readers and emerging scholars. With powerful illustrations by Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, this poignant work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
  • Age Group: Young Readers
Khamisi
Khamisi

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