Collection: Shop Black

J is for Justice. U is for Union Army.

J Is for Juneteenth was written by three young writers as part of a collaborative youth writing competition hosted by Planting People Growing Justice Leadership Institute. By spelling out the word "Juneteenth," the authors lead young readers through a joyful and thoughtful celebration of the history of this important holiday.

Parks' impactful images from the forefront of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements

Originally published in 1971, Gordon Parks' Born Black was the first book to unite his writing and his photography and also the first to provide a focused survey of Parks' documentation of a crucial time for the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
More than 50 years later, this expanded edition illuminates Parks' vision for the book and offers deeper insight into the series contained within. The original publication featured nine articles commissioned by Life magazine from 1963 to 1970 supplemented with later commentary by Parks and presented as his personal account of these important historical moments. Born Black includes the original text and images, as well as additional photographs from each series, spreads from the 1971 book, early correspondence and reproductions of related Life articles.
The nine series included in Born Black include a rare glimpse inside San Quentin State Prison; extensive documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; his commentaries on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate portrait studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver; and a narrative of the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem. These selections have come to define Parks' legendary career as a photographer and activist. This reimagined, comprehensive edition of Born Black highlights the lasting legacy of these projects and their importance to our understanding of critical years in American history.

Memories and insights of a lifelong social justice advocate as she searches for freedom as an African American woman

Millicent E. Brown's family home at 270 Ashley Avenue in Charleston, South Carolina, was a center of civil rights activity. There Brown gained intimate knowledge of the struggle for racial justice, and those experiences set her on a life course dedicated to the civil rights struggle. Best known as the named plaintiff in the federal court case that, in 1963, forced the initial desegregation of public schools in South Carolina, her experiences as an activist range across years and well beyond her native state. Another Sojourner Looking for Truth is Brown's insightful reflection on her search for freedom in a nation deeply mired in white supremacist beliefs and overt violence against people of color.

In this revealing memoir, Brown writes about her fears and doubts, as well as the challenges of being a teenager expected to "represent the race" to combat negative stereotypes of African Americans. Readers also gain perspective on the interpersonal aspects of white backlash to civil rights progress and strategic machinations within the movement. Overall, Brown's words will inform, inspire, and challenge everyone to better understand the civil rights struggle and confront its ongoing challenges.

A major survey chronicling Thomas' vibrant, rhinestone-adorned paintings

New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas' critically acclaimed and extensive body of work spans painting, collage, print, photography, video and immersive installations. With influences ranging from 19th-century painting to popular culture, Thomas' art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while expanding on and subverting common definitions of beauty, sexuality, celebrity and politics. This major survey publication further affirms Thomas' status as a key figure of contemporary art. It features notable works that are arranged in thematic chapters throughout the book.
The book also features an interview with the artist by Rachel Thomas, and is followed by essays from Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, T.K. Smith and Christine Y. Kim, which cover her distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of intergenerational female empowerment, autobiography, memory and tenets of Black feminist theory. In particular, they explore how Thomas subverts art history to reclaim the notions of repose, rest and leisure in works that celebrate self-expression and joy. For the artist, repose is a radical act, pointing to "what is able to happen once you have the agency."
Mickalene Thomas (born 1971) is an international, award-winning, multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate portraits of Black women composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel.

In The Stuff of Hollywood, the camera is both a witness of truths and an instrument capturing the line between real and engineered violence.

The Stuff of Hollywood is a meditation on the pervasiveness of violence in America. In this book-length poem, Niki Herd relies on various modes--images, prose, lyric and documentary poems--to reflect upon the quotidian nature of gun culture, police killings, and political unrest. A busy Waffle House, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, inside an Uber on a Chicago street, readers are placed in various "film" locations and watch as America becomes a character in its own absurd movie. In one section, excerpted language from the continuity script of D.W. Griffith's 1915 The Birth of a Nation is juxtaposed with text from the January 6 congressional hearings, suggesting a fragile line between real and engineered brutality. Herd interrogates empire and the ways in which violence is consumed and normalized. The Stuff of Hollywood is an elegy for a country that never existed beyond the screen.

A modern-day writer and a Harlem Renaissance artist are connected by a painting with a deadly secret in this gripping dual-timeline gothic thriller.

Shanice Pierce knows better than to heed bad omens. But she has a hard time ignoring the signs when she finds herself newly single and out of a job on the same seemingly cursed day.

Then, while cleaning out her grandmother's house, Shanice comes across a painting she hasn't seen in years. Drawn to the haunting portrait in a way she can't explain, Shanice accepts her grandmother's offer to keep the family heirloom.

She soon uncovers the story of the artist, a Harlem Renaissance painter named Estelle Johnson. The young woman was taken under wing by the wealthy art patron Maude Bachmann--or "Godmother" as she insisted her artists called her--and vanished shortly after Bachmann's brutal murder a century ago.

As Shanice digs deeper, a paranoia that's haunted her for years returns. She becomes convinced she's being stalked, and that the deaths happening around her are connected to the staggering offer she turned down for the painting.

But the truth hiding in plain sight is even more shocking--and deadly--than Shanice could possibly have imagined . . .

From legendary author and critic bell hooks and multi-Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka comes an acclaimed ode to Black boy joy, perfect for fans of I Am Every Good Thing and I Am Enough.
I be boy. All bliss boy. All fine beat. All beau boy. Beautiful.
Here a tight, exuberant story from two award-winning creators that captures the essence and energy of what it means to be a boy. Chris Raschka's soulful illustrations buzz with a force that is the perfect match for bell hooks' powerful words.
Praise for Be Boy Buzz: *"This spare, poetic riff on young manhood plumbs the delights and contradictions of what it means to be a boy... Hooks's rhythmic blend of brevity and eloquence launches Raschka's trademark visual haiku... This life-affirming book will have readers as much 'in love with being a boy' as are its own utterly irresistible characters."
---Publishers Weekly, starred review

Blending poetry and prose, music, and genealogy, Jive Poetic's Skip Tracer is a memoir structured as a "hybrid sound system" (complete with "records," "tracks," "decks," and "channels"), expertly curated to convey the complexity of Blackness in the Americas. In this ancestral and cultural excavation, Jive conducts archival and oral-history research into his family's connections to Jamaica, Panama, Brazil, and Cuba to explore the impact of culture, environment, and family on first- and second-generation Black Americans in the United States. He also traces the profound influence that hip-hop, soul, R&B, reggae, and other popular musical genres have had on him--all the while performing a dynamic re-creation of his legendary onstage persona on the page. A raw and affecting indictment of police violence and racism in the United States, Skip Tracer is also a searingly honest exploration of personal identity, power, and privilege--all expressed in the unmistakable language, rhythm, and style that characterizes Jive's live performances.

With Trouble in Queenstown, Delia Pitts introduces private investigator Vandy Myrick in a powerful mystery that blends grief, class, race, and family with thrilling results.

Evander "Vandy" Myrick became a cop to fulfill her father's expectations. After her world cratered, she became a private eye to satisfy her own. Now she's back in Queenstown, New Jersey, her childhood home, in search of solace and recovery. It's a small community of nine thousand souls crammed into twelve square miles, fenced by cornfields, warehouses, pharma labs, and tract housing. As a Black woman, privacy is hard to come by in "Q-Town," and worth guarding.

For Vandy, that means working plenty of divorce cases. They're nasty, lucrative, and fun in an unwholesome way. To keep the cash flowing and expand her local contacts, Vandy agrees to take on a new client, the mayor's nephew, Leo Hannah. Leo wants Vandy to tail his wife to uncover evidence for a divorce suit.

At first the surveillance job seems routine, but Vandy soon realizes there's trouble beneath the bland surface of the case when a racially charged murder with connections to the Hannah family rocks Q-Town. Fingers point. Clients appear. Opposition to the inquiry hardens. And Vandy's sight lines begin to blur as her determination to uncover the truth deepens. She's a minor league PI with few friends and no resources. Logic pegs her chances of solving the case between slim and hell no. But logic isn't her strong suit. Vandy won't back off.

A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.

Mavis Miller is not a PTA mom. She has enough on her plate with her feisty seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, an exhausting job at a nonprofit, and the complexities of a multigenerational household. So no one is more surprised than Mavis when she caves to Trisha Holbrook, the long-reigning, slightly terrifying PTA president, and finds herself in charge of the school's brand-new DEI committee.

As one of the few Black parents at this California elementary school, Mavis tries to convince herself this is an opportunity for real change. But things go off the rails at the very first meeting, when the new principal's plans leave Trisha absolutely furious. Later that night, when Mavis spies Trisha in yellow rubber gloves and booties, lugging cleaning supplies and giant black trash bags to her waiting minivan, it's only natural that her mind jumps to somewhere it surely wouldn't in the light of day.

Except Principal Smith fails to show up for work the next morning, and has been MIA since the meeting. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mavis, along with the school psychologist with the great forearms (look, it's worth noting), launches an investigation that will challenge her views on parenting, friendship, and elementary school politics.

Brilliantly written, It's Elementary is a quick-witted, escapist romp that perfectly captures just how far parents will go to give their kids the very best, all wrapped in a mystery that will leave you guessing to the very end.

Months after meeting a kind gentleman on the most embarrassing night of her life, a newly divorced woman gains the courage to reclaim her life and explore newfound love with the perfect stranger in this enthralling romance, perfect for fans of Kennedy Ryan.

Pascha St. Claire has nothing to live for.

After five years, her once-loving husband, Raymond, decides to end their marriage. He's unable to deal with her mental health, significant weight gain, or the idea that she cannot seem to birth him a child. She returns home one night to find her belongings on the curb and the locks to her home changed. Her pleading falls on deaf ears as Raymond has made the decision to end their marriage. With no other option, Pascha is forced to leave and never look back.

When Callum Ellis accepted the reservation for his car service, the last thing he expected was to pick up a beautiful, weeping stranger. His heart goes out to her as he drops her off at a hotel. After discovering her credit cards have been canceled, Callum swoops in to pay for her stay. Though she wants to protest, Pascha realizes she is in no position to decline the stranger's generous offer.

Months roll by and Callum is still unable to get Pascha out of his head. A chance encounter finally lands him in her presence, and Callum is determined to make the most of it. Though she initially declines his interest, Pascha soon finds herself intrigued by the once-kind stranger. Fear has her recoiling at his advances, but men like Callum come to restore. Will Pascha continue to avoid the inevitable, or does she find the courage to love again?

When people think of baseball trailblazers, their minds immediately go to Jackie Robinson. He was the man who broke the color barrier, appearing in 1947 for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and would go on to a Hall of Fame career. His number 42 is retired throughout baseball, and every year MLB holds "Jackie Robinson Day" across the league.

But he was far from the only trailblazer. That same year, a twenty-three-year-old Larry Doby appeared in a game for the Cleveland Indians. He is essentially known as the second African American to break the color barrier, and was the first to appear in the American League (as the Dodgers are in the National League).

While Robinson is always the one to be spoken about, Doby was just as good in the field and at the plate. In fact, he was a 9x All-Star, a World Series champion (being the first African American, along with teammate Satchel Paige, to win a World Series), home run and batting champ, and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1998 after an incredible 13-year MLB career. He is, and will always be, one of the greatest players in baseball history.

Beginning his professional baseball career at the tender age of eighteen, he would play five years for the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues. In between, he spent two years out of baseball, defending his country in World War II as a member of the US Navy.

While Robinson had instant success with the Dodgers, Doby struggled off the bat. Having to endure immense racism (from fans, other ballplayers, and even teammates), disrespect, and threats on his life (and that of his family), it did not take until the following year, 1948, before he truly emerged as one of the best players in the game.

Written by esteemed author Jerry Izenberg--who saw Doby play with the Eagles as a youngster and would build a lifelong friendship with the ballplayer--Larry Doby is the real, raw story of perseverance and determination in the face of immense hatred.

Including in-depth research, to go along with personal accounts and numerous one-on-one interviews, Izenberg delivers an incredible tale that gives Doby his due as one of the all-time greats, while also sharing the struggles, trials, and tribulations of being a black man in a white country.

With Major League Baseball finally incorporating the records and stats of those in the Negro Leagues, Doby's story is one that is long-overdo, shedding light on what it was like playing baseball and being black in the 1940s and '50s, and how hard work and determination was key to rising above all the hate and becoming one of the greatest to ever play the game

In 1860, Eliza Winston escaped enslavement while traveling in Minnesota, where she secured her freedom through legal appeal. Her story adds powerful testimony to African American experiences and perseverance in antebellum America.

On August 22, 1860, an enslaved woman from Mississippi named Eliza Winston petitioned for her freedom before a judge in Minnesota--and she won. After she left the state for Canada, the abolitionists who had helped her told and retold the story, emphasizing their own actions; their detractors claimed they had used Winston as a pawn. For more than 150 years, historians' accounts have emphasized the mobs who battled in the streets after the ruling, focusing on the implications of the events for Minnesota politics rather than Winston's own story. With It Took Courage, Christopher P. Lehman helps set the record straight.

Lehman uncovers the story of Winston's first forty-two years and her long struggle to obtain her freedom. She was sold away from her birth family; her husband, a free man, died before he could purchase her freedom. She labored in Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Minnesota. For thirty-one years she was enslaved by the family of President Andrew Jackson, who bought her for his great-niece and paid a cousin of James K. Polk to hold her in trust. Winston's victory produced a compelling irony: a woman Jackson himself had enslaved defeated a part of his legacy in Minnesota.

The survival of the remarkable story of Eliza Winston's battle for individual freedom is an important contribution to the larger understanding of what slavery meant on this continent and how it affected individual lives--in both North and South. Winston's experience demonstrates the lengths to which a person would go to escape slavery, attempting to work both outside and inside the flawed and inequitable laws of the time, until finally receiving justice. If the traditional accounts relied on stereotypical depictions of Winston as "simple-minded," in Lehman's skillful description, Winston appears as a capable, mature woman who understood her life and her values. Eliza Winston herself made the bold decision to leave behind everything she had known for an uncertain but free future.

In this series of books, we'll follow the life and exploits of our antihero, Grimm, as he tackles life, love, drug pushers, mafiosos, and eventually, the system itself. He's smart, he's handsome, he's dangerous . . . he is the Black Godfather, and dope pushers beware.

Grimm's childhood wasn't too much unlike any of the other kids in his dirt-poor neighborhood. Hard times and hard lives. For the most part, while his best friends Spoon and Goldie were out getting into mischief, Grimm was in the house studying or reading. Grimm had been somewhat of a child prodigy, highly skilled with computers and a photographic memory. His intellect had fast-tracked his graduation from high school, and he received his diploma at only sixteen years old.

Following in the footsteps of his deceased grandfather, Grimm enlists in the army. Instead, however, he would spend seven years trapped in a Saudi prison camp, subject to torture, starvation, and, most notably, the Pitt, a deadly underground fighting circuit where he was bestowed the nickname The Black Death. By the time he was rescued, he emerged a two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound weapon of mass destruction.

Upon Grimm's return home, he finds that his neighborhood has changed. His mother is a broken shell of her former self, and his father has graduated from drinking liquor to smoking crack. His siblings are spread out, and his family is torn apart. His best friend Spoon is now an up-and-coming hustler and pimp, and Goldie has become a prostitute.

It's up to Grimm to fix his family and community. He embarks on a one-man mission to try and push some of the low-level dealers and users out of the neighborhood. Word of what he has done starts to spread, and the community is hopeful now that there's someone decent back around to protect those who can't defend themselves. He's beloved in the neighborhood, and some of the people start referring to him as the Black Godfather because of the way he's taking care of his people.

Grimm recruits his veteran buddies as backup, and in under a year, Grimm and his unit manage to do what the NYPD couldn't in a decade: clean up their block. Grimm now has a small army behind him that is looking to lock the city down.

Gradually he finds himself becoming more like the men he's fighting against. He starts slipping further into the darkness of the streets and his new Black Godfather status. Grimm models his team after the mafia and tells himself that they aren't a criminal organization, but in truth, they are. He's pushed the drugs out of his neighborhood, leading to them spreading elsewhere.

This all sets the scene for a confrontation between Grimm and Spoon. The two once best friends are now bitter rivals and locked in a personal war in the streets. It's a long and hard-fought battle, but it's only the beginning of a greater war. What started on the streets will take Grimm on a bloody path through the American ghettos and lead him to the halls of power, where he will face his greatest enemy yet.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave

In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland's eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks. Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with "the Code," a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz's flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.

Filled with rich, true details--much of the story is drawn from historical events--and told in McBride's signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness.