Black Studies

Hardcover. NY, Abrams Press, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Illustrations, 470 pages with index. A groundbreaking, timely history of the largely unknown early days of Black basketball, bringing to life the trailblazers, entertainers, gangsters, and supremely talented athletes who made the game From the introduction of the game of basketball to Black communities in 1904 to the integration of the NBA in 1950, there was a full era in the development of the game. It was a time when Black players were discriminated against and opportunities were limited, but entrepreneurial men and women nurtured the game and breathed life into a sport they loved. This period was known as the Black Fives Era (teams at the time were often called "fives"), and was akin to the golden age of the Negro Leagues. But despite fierce rivalries between big-city clubs, innovative managers, and star players, this period is almost entirely unknown to basketball fans. Claude Johnson has made it his mission to change that. An advocate fiercely committed to our history, for more than two decades Johnson has conducted interviews, mined archives, collected artifacts, and helped to preserve an important, culturally rich era that otherwise would have been lost. The Black Fives is the result of his work, a landmark narrative history that will braid together the stories of these forgotten pioneers and rewrite our understanding of the story of basketball.

Softcover. Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press , reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 167 pages. After nearly 200,000 African-American soldiers fought in the Civil War, Congress enacted legislation to authorize regiments of cavalry and infantry for service in the West. The Ninth and Tenth cavalries won fame as "buffalo soldiers" in the Indian wars, nearly overshadowing the critical support role of the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth infantries. Now Arlen L. Fowler brings to light the story of African-American infantry service from 1869 to 1891 in Texas, Indian Territory, the Dakotas, Montana, and Arizona.

Softcover. NY, New American Library Signet,, 5th pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Softcover, mass market paperback, 224 pages, b&w photos. Light shelfwear, clean.

Hardcover. NY, One World/Ballantine, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A fictional narrative base on the life of America's first black female millionaire. Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America's first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes. Renowned author Alex Haley became fascinated by the story of this extraordinary heroine, and before his death in 1992 he embarked on the research and outline of a major novel based on her life. Now with The Black Rose, critically acclaimed writer Tananarive Due brings the work to inspiring completion. "I got my start by giving myself a start," Madam C.J. was fond of saying as she recounted her transformation from the uneducated laundress Sarah Breedlove to a woman of wealth, culture, and celebrity. Madam C.J. was nearing forty and married to a maverick Denver newspaperman when the wonder-working hair care method she discovered changed her life. Seemingly overnight, she built a marketing empire that enlisted more than twenty thousand bright young African American women to demonstrate and sell her products door-to-door. By the time she died in 1919, Madam C.J. Walker had constructed her own factory from the ground up, established a training school, and built a twenty-room mansion at Irvington on the Hudson, New York, called Villa Lawaro.

Softcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin, reprint., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 244 pages. The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (ne Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Viking Press, reprint, 1956, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, tan cloth covers with brown lettering, 187/189 pages. Lyrics with music and a preface of the songs. Two volumes in one. No dust jacket. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press, Revised Ed., 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 319 pages. B&w illustrations. A well-researched and authoritative study of 'negro' soldiers who wished to remain in the United States Army following the Civil War. They were eventually organized into the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments their service in controlling Indians on the Great Plains during the next twenty years was as invaluable as it was unpraised. With Bibliography and Index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Counterpoint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 642 pages. Hailed in 1849 as "a new department in the literature of civilization," the slave narrative forms the foundation of the African American literary tradition. From the late-eighteenth-century narratives by Africans who endured the harrowing Middle Passage, through the classic American fugitive slave narratives of the mid-nineteenth century, slave narratives have provided some of the most graphic and damning documentary evidence of the horrors of slavery. Riveting, passionate, and politically charged, the slave narrative blends personal memory and rhetorical attacks on slavery to create powerful literature and propaganda.The Civitas Anthology presents the seven classic antislavery narratives of the antebellum period in their entirety: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave , the first slave narrative published by a woman in the Americas; The Confessions of Nat Turner , written when Turner was asked to record his motivation for leading the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history; The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , an international bestseller and the first narrative to fashion the male fugitive slave into an African American cultural hero; The Narrative of William W. Brown , an account that explored with unprecedented realism the slave's survival ethic and the art of the slave trickster; The Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb , the story of the struggles of the most memorable family man among the classic slave narrators; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , a gripping chronicle of one of the most daring and celebrated slave escapes ever recorded; and Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl , a dramatic text that exposed the sexual abuse of female slaves and pioneered the image of the fugitive slave woman as an articulate resister and survivor.Born out of lives of unparalleled suffering, the slave narrative captures all the bravery, drama, and hope that characterized the African American struggle against slavery. From these beginnings came some of the most influential novels in American literature, for the works of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Toni Morrison owe much of their power and social resonance to the slave narrative tradition. The Civitas Anthology gathers the most important narratives in this tradition into one volume for the first time, an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and general readers. Clean copy.

Softcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, reprint, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 311 pages. A 1913 novel about a black homesteader in South Dakota based on the author's experiences in the midwest as a young man. He later went on to fame as a celebrated early filmmaker. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dial Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A view of American film-making from the author's viewpoint.

Softcover. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1st pbk., 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 258 pages. A study of various black, chicano, Chinese and other ethnic neighborhoods in various American cities. (Circa 1973) Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Robert M. McBride, 2nd pr., 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, floral decorated boards, black cloth spine, paper title labels, lacking dust jacket. American playwright, Green won the Pulitzer in 1927 for In Abraham's Bosom. 317 pages, top edge stained red. A clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Philadelphia, J B Lippincott, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 103 pages. Edited by Harold M Hyman. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 541 pages. It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Established in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan still remains one of America's most secretive organizations. New York photojournalist Anthony Karen first transcended that secrecy several years ago when he got the opportunity to photograph a KKK cross-lighting ceremony. Since then, Karen has been documenting Klan organizations throughout the country. In The Invisible Empire: Ku Klux Klan, those photographs are compiled to form an absorbing document of one of the most notorious groups in history. Taken with unrestricted access, Karen's images bring us deep inside America's most private white nationalist organizations. Beginning with a brief introduction into the history of the Klan, the book provides detailed visual accounts of modern-day Klan life, including candid shots of rallies, individual portraits of Klansmen and women, as well as a look at the naturalization process for new members. Presented in intimate profiles are: a functioning Klan ministry, a group that has merged National Socialism with Klan ideologies, and a 58-year-old seamstress who makes custom Klan robes, among others. Accompanied by quotations from the late Dale Fox, Imperial Wizard of The Brotherhood of the Klans, The Invisible Empire: Ku Klux Klan offers an unprecedented glimpse into the shadowy society and its mysterious inner workings.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 512 pages. The second volume in this masterful biography finds Hughes rooting himself in Harlem, receiving stimulation from his rich cultural surroundings. Here he rethought his view of art and radicalism, and cultivated relationships with younger, more militant writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Bakara. Illustrated with black & white photographs, a few by Roy DeCarava with whom Hughes published "The Sweet Flypaper of Life" and a portrait by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1964, Softcover, 96 pages, illustrated wraps. A documentation and moving tribute to the Civil Rights activists of the 1960s, many b&w photographs by Danny Lyons. Stated First Printing. Wrappers have creases, rubbing. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf. Otherwise clean. Light tanning to pages.

Softcover. Cleveland OH, The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 382 pages. Based on the field's most prolific, imaginative, and best-known scholars, this ultimate reference work on the Negro Leagues includes a complete register of all the players--3,400 names, with positions and teams from before the turn of the century into the 1950s--annual rosters, in-depth histories, and more than 75 original photographs.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, repriny, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 290 pages. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system forinterpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 386 pages. The first narrative history of the Civil War told by the very people it freed. Groundbreaking, compelling, and poignant, The Slaves' War delivers an unprecedented vision of the nation's bloodiest conflict. An acclaimed historian of nineteenth-century and African-American history, Andrew Ward gives us the first narrative of the Civil War told from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided. Woven together from hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs, here is the Civil War as seen from not only battlefields, capitals, and camps, but also slave quarters, kitchens, roadsides, farms, towns, and swamps. Speaking in a quintessentially American language of wit, candor, and biblical power, army cooks and launderers, runaways, teamsters, and gravediggers bring the war to vivid life. From slaves' theories about the causes of the war to their frank assessments of such major figures as Lincoln, Davis, Lee, and Grant; from their searing memories of the carnage of battle to their often startling attitudes toward masters and liberators alike; and from their initial jubilation at the Yankee invasion of the slave South to the crushing disappointment of freedom's promise unfulfilled, The Slaves' War is a transformative and engrossing vision of America's Second Revolution. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 154 pages, in a lightly worn and price-clipped dust jacket. A novel by the African American poet and essayist set in the American South.

Hardcover. New York , Dial Books, 10th pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 151 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color, B&W illustrations by Jerry Pinkney. Tight copy. A retelling of the Afro-American tales about the adventures and misadventures of Brer Rabbit and his friends and enemies.

Hardcover. NY, Wiley, 2nd pr., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The long-awaited, untold, inside story of the rise of the legendary actor, singer, scholar, and activist. The first volume of this major biography breaks new ground. The greatest scholar-athlete-performing artist in U.S. history, Paul Robeson was one of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century.Now his son, Paul Robeson Jr., traces the dramatic arc of his rise to fame, painting a definitive picture of Paul Robeson's formative years. His father was an escaped slave; his mother, a descendent of freedmen; and his wife, the brilliant and ambitious Eslanda Cardozo Goode. With a law degree from Columbia University; a professional football career; title roles in Eugene O'Neill's plays and in Shakespeare's Othello; and a concert career in America and Europe, Robeson dominated his era. 383 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Prentice Hall, 1st pbk, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 184 pages. Revealing and disturbing study of the racist ideas and fantasies of southern whites after the Civil War and examines their racial fantasies and the social and psychological roots of those fantasies. He reveals how a complex set of anxieties and repressions in Southern life led whites to need "Negro" Inferiority." Name on title page otherwise clean.