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Dark Days, Bright Nights

by  Peniel E. Joseph

From Black Power to Barack Obama

The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which came to an end along with the idealism of the 1960s. In Dark Days, Bright Nights, acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s-particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act-to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama. Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure.

Joseph resurrects the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements. Told through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world. ... More

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Triangular Road

A Memoir by Paule Marshall

In Triangular Road, famed novelist Paule Marshall tells the story of her years as a fledgling young writer in the 1960s. A memoir of self-discovery, it also offers an affectionate tribute to the ... More

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Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow

Black Women , Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones

The Bancroft Prize-winning classic, now completely revised and updated ... More

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Born to Use Mics

Reading Nas's Illmatic by Michael Eric Dyson, Sohail Daulatzai

The best and brightest writers of the hip-hop generation reflect upon the era’s landmark album: Nas’s Illmatic ... More

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Past Is Never Dead

The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption by Harry N. MacLean

A dramatic courtroom thriller that tests the bounds of redemption for the racial sins of the American South, by the best-selling author of In Broad Daylight ... More

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Racial Paranoia

by John L. Jackson

A provocative new paradigm of race relations in the twenty-first century, in which the overt racism of the past has been replaced by subconscious suspicions and whispered conspiracy theories ... More

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Introducing Bert Williams

Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star by Camille F. Forbes

From the traveling troupes of the Wild West all the way to the bright lights of Broadway, Bert Williams broke through the color barriers and changed the face of the American stage ... More

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