Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can...

"Ella's world is changed when Katherine St. James, a mysterious white researcher from Princeton, arrives in their racially divided Mississippi town. The community is immediately suspicious -what does Katherine want, and why is she really there? As tensions mount and rumors swirl, and the tide swings against her, Ella and Katherine St. James are drawn into a complicated friendship that drowns out the outside world.... until it doesn't, and the relationship...

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and...

"Families may not always see eye to eye; we get on each other's nerves, have different perspectives and lives--especially if we've grown up in different generations. But for the Ruffin family and many others, there has been one constant that connects them: racism hasn't gone anywhere. From her raucous musical numbers to turning upsetting news into laughs as the host of The Amber Ruffin Show or in her Late Night with Seth Meyers segments, Amber is...

In this audacious debut feature, João Paulo Miranda Maria conjures a surreal image of the racial and social rifts in modern day Brazil. Cristovam (played by Cinema Novo icon Antônio Pitanga), an Indigenous Black man from the rural North, moves to an industrialized Southern town populated by the descendants of Austrian ex-pats to work in a milk factory. Immediately confronted with their virulent racism, he becomes more and more estranged from the...

"In 2012, the first African American president is assassinated by a white extremist - just four days after he is elected. The horrific tragedy leads to riots, financial collapse, and ultimately, a full-on civil war. In its aftermath, millions are left homeless as famine and disease spread throughout the country. But from Chicago, a mysterious voice cries out... To Leon Crane, a former NASA scientist now struggling to survive on the streets, the pleas...

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...

James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer's ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin's controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman. And it explores such varied themes as the relations between blacks and whites, the role of blacks

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From the New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke comes another brilliant Dave Robicheaux novel—now available in ebook—featuring the Louisiana detective in a race to solve a murder before more blood is shed.
The Fontenot family has lived as sharecroppers on Bertrand land for as long as anyone can remember. So why are they now being forced from their homes? And what does the murder of Della Landry—the...

"Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means woman. It's fair to say that Maddie's life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson's. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting. When her...