JD Jackson
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"Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American,...
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Drawing on 720 original interviews, a New York Times best-selling sportswriter captures as never before the elusive truth about the greatest athlete of all time who took the world by storm from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s--and then, almost overnight, disappeared.
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"John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson...
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BEST BOOKS 2021
Celebrate Juneteenth
June Is African American Music Appreciation Month
Juneteenth for All Ages
Celebrate Juneteenth
June Is African American Music Appreciation Month
Juneteenth for All Ages
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"A Little Devil in America is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of black performance, in this moment when black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. With sharp insight, humor, and heart, Abdurraqib examines how black performance happens in specific moments in time and space--midcentury Paris, the moon, or a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. At the outset of this project,...
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Trinidad. Audre is being sent to live in America with her father because her strictly religious mother caught her with her secret girlfriend, the pastor's daughter. Her grandmother Queenie tries to reassure her granddaughter that she won't lose her roots. Minneapolis. Mabel is trying to figure out why she feels the way she feels-- about her ex Terrell, about her girl Jada and that moment they had in the woods. When Audre and her father come for dinner,...
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Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963
On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city’s streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders’ criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, “Letter...
On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city’s streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders’ criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, “Letter...
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"Not unlike some of Ralph Ellison’s or Richard Wright’s best work. White Guilt, a serious meditation on vital issues, deserves a wide readership.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney
...29) Crow
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In 1898, Moses Thomas's summer vacation does not go exactly as planned as he contends with family problems and the ever-changing alliances among his friends at the same time as he is exposed to the escalating tension between the African-American and white communities of Wilmington, North Carolina.
30) The racketeer
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When a federal judge and his secretary fail to appear for a scheduled trial and panicked clerks call for an FBI investigation, a harrowing murder case ensues and culminates in the imprisonment of a lawyer who imparts the story of who killed the judge and why. Given the importance of what they do, and the controversies that often surround them, and the violent people they sometimes confront, it is remarkable that in the history of this country only...
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"A chilling and blisteringly relevant literary novel of social horror centered around a brutal killing that takes place in a full-contact haunted escape room-a provocative exploration of capitalism, hate politics, racial fetishism, and our obsession with fear as entertainment. On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities,...
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In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters' stories build and build...
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Even though it is now 1901, the people of Buxton, Canada (originally a settlement of runaway slaves) and Chatham, Canada are still haunted by two events of half a century before--the American Civil War, and the Irish potato famine, and the lasting damage those events caused to the survivors.
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"Few names in the history of baseball evoke the excellence and dynamism that Rickey Henderson's does. He holds the record for the most stolen bases in a single game, and he's scored more runs than any player ever. "If you cut Rickey Henderson in half, you'd have two Hall of Famers," the baseball historian Bill James once said. But perhaps even more than his prowess on the field, Rickey Henderson's is a story of Oakland, California, the town that gave...
36) Pleasantville
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"Locke reintroduces us to environmental lawyer Jay Porter (her Black Water Rising protagonist), who takes one last case on the behalf of the community of Pleasantville in this new thriller--only to become embroiled in its shadowy politics, a disturbing education in how far those in power are willing to go to win"--
37) The outsider
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"Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself--a man of superior intellect who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes. The Outsider is an important work of fiction that depicts American racism and its devastating consequences in raw and unflinching terms. Brilliantly imagined and frighteningly prescient, it is an epic exploration of the tragic roots of criminal behavior"--Amazon.com.
38) The tradition
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Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown's daring new poetry colleciton, despite the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questions why and how we've become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither--or survive....
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"Ten heavenly stories that chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. When Randall Kenan's first collection was published, The New York Times called it "nothing short of a wonder-book." With comparable inventiveness but seasoned by maturity and shot through with humor, his second collection, If I Had Two Wings, riffs on the human relationship with the transcendent. Rooted in Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, NC, this book also travels...