Library Displays at UCBA

Professor Gates traveled across the country interviewing forty-four famous and not-so-famous individuals from parts of the African-American community - the "Black Elite," "The New South," "Chicago's South Side," and "Black Hollywood.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward--with hope and pain--into the future.

Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews—with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment.

Just as blues influenced the Harlem Renaissance and jazz influenced the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop's musical and cultural force has shaped the aesthetics of and given rise to a new generation of American poets. Edited by poets Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop is the first anthology of poetry from the hip-hop generation. The Breakbeat Poets are multigenerational and multiracial, employing traditional and wild style poetics to narrate a new landscape.

On July 7, 2016, during a street demonstration against fatal shootings by the police, a sniper killed five Dallas police officers. Chief Brown quickly ended the gunman's siege, calmed the community, and lent context for the rest of the country. Brown offers insights into that tragic day, as well as highlights of his 33-year career, from quelling riots, to reducing crime to 50-year lows and excessive-force complaints by 70%. Brown also outlines his community-based approach to policing.

A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.

Les Payne embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X--all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. Setting Malcolm's life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century's most politically relevant figures "from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary."

In Everyday Violence against Black and Latinx LGBT Communities, Siobhan Brooks argues that hate crimes and violence against Black and Latinx LGBT people are the products of institutions and ideologies that exist both outside and inside of Black and Latinx communities. Brooks analyzes families, educational systems, healthcare industries, and religious spaces as institutions that can perpetuate and transform the political and cultural beliefs and attitudes that engender violence toward LGBT Black and Latinx people. – Spring 2023

A provocative analysis of the new contours of Black nationalism and feminism in the context of the changing politics of race in America.

Christina Vella offers a thorough biography of George Washington Carver and discovers an unassuming intellectual with a quirky sense of humor, striking eccentricities, and an unwavering religious faith. She explores Carver's anguished dealings with Booker T. Washington across their nineteen years working together at the Tuskegee Institute -- a turbulent partnership often fraught with jealousy. Uneasy in personal relationships, Carver lost one woman he loved to suicide and, years later, directed his devotion toward a white man.

Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.

Connecting classic rhythm & blues and rock & roll to the Civil Rights Movement, and classic soul and funk to the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Movement explores what each of these musics and movements contributed to rap, neo-soul, hip hop culture, and the broader Hip Hop Movement.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery.

Acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin's published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote.

Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.

Explores the lives and fates of seven men, from Basil Michael, who marries a woman he does not love for the sake of her children, to Eugene Turner, torn between his homosexuality and his beloved wife.

Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.

Stacey Abrams' Minority Leader is the handbook for outsiders, written with the awareness of the experiences and challenges that hinder anyone who exists beyond the structure of traditional white male power--women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make a difference.

The life story of Coretta Scott King--wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), and singular twentieth-century American civil and human rights activist--as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds.

Never Caught is the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington's runaway slave who risked everything to escape the nation's capital and reach freedom. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.

Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible.

From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni's poetry has influenced literary figures from James Baldwin to Blackalicious, and touched millions of readers worldwide. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever.

Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived.

In this book, Gail L. Thompson takes on the volatile topic of the role of race in education and explores the black-white achievement gap and the cultural divide that exists between some teachers and African American students.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood--where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned--Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

The author presents a collection of short fiction loosely based on her own life, including "To My Young Husband," which describes life amid the turbulence of the Deep South at the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Days of Grace, a collection of positive, uplifting stories of seemingly small acts of grace from across the sports world that have helped to bridge cultural and racial divides. Blake reveals how, through seemingly small acts of grace, we can confront hatred, bigotry, and injustice with virtue--and use it to propel ourselves to greater heights.

Traces the career of the influential African-American writer, citing the historical backdrop of her life and work while considering her relationships with and influences on top literary, intellectual, and artistic figures.