Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New...

An "elegant and inspiring memoir" by the human rights activist who changed the minds of her elders, reformed traditions from the inside, and is creating a better future for girls and women throughout Africa (Sonia Faleiro, New York Times).

Nice Leng'ete was raised in a Maasai village in Kenya. In 1998, when Nice was six, her parents fell sick and died, and Nice and her sister Soila

...

In this uplifting memoir, the acclaimed singer reflects “on life, the arts, and spirituality . . . Inspiring” (Booklist).
 
Jessye Norman is one of the world’s most admired and beloved singers—and her life story is as moving and dramatic as the great operatic roles she has performed on stage.
 
Born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, she studied the piano and sang...

Every day, I have lived through the massacre. While our country may forget this history, I cannot." Viola Ford FletcherViola Ford Fletcher's memoir "DON'T LET THEM BURY MY STORY" vividly captures the lasting impact of the Tulsa Massacre on her life. As the oldest survivor and last living witness of the tragic events that unfolded in 1921, she shares her testimony with poignant clarity. From the terror of her childhood as a seven-year-old fleeing the...

“Richard Pryor was chain lightning to everything around him. He shocked the world through with human electricity. He blew all our comfortable balance to hell. And Furious Cool captures it brilliantly.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

Richard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly he was the most successful black

...

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the immensely powerful autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, who wrote under a pen name. A feminist work, she uses her experiences to state and restate her belief that though all unhappiness sprung from being a slave, she had to endure worse, being also a woman. Her experiences show that the only refuge and relief to be found were in other women, and also that women were less able to attempt freedom when

...

Running for My Life is not a story about Africa or track-and-field athletics. It is about outrunning the devil and achieving the impossible; it is about faith, diligence, and the desire to give back. It is the American dream come true and a stark reminder that saving one can help save thousands more.

In this heart-wrenching story, you'll learn about

Lopez Lomong's harrowing kidnapping at the age of six, becoming one

...

A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.
The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges...

"A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions,...

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey,first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of...