Explore the comprehensive and compelling (Jon Meacham) biography of civil rights leader John Lewis, celebrated as the conscience of Congress, through a narrative that weaves together exclusive interviews, never-before-seen FBI files, and documents, offering profound insights into his significant role in American history and the civil rights movement.

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions. As a Freedom Rider, he played a crucial role in integrating bus stations across the South. Lewis was a prominent leader in the Nashville sit-in movement and delivered a historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington. As the youngest speaker and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he transformed it into a major civil rights organization. His legacy endures through the harrowing events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he survived a brutal beating on Bloody Sunday.

David Greenberg's authoritative...definitive biography (David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author) follows Lewis's journey beyond the civil rights era, highlighting his leadership in the Voter Education Project, where he helped enroll millions of African American voters across the South. This book uncovers the little-known story of his ascent in politics, first locally in Atlanta and then as a respected member of Congress. As part of the Democratic leadership, Lewis was admired on both sides of the aisle for his unwavering dedication to nonviolent integration and justice.

Rich with new insights, Greenberg's work captures John Lewis's influential career through documents from numerous archives, interviews with 275 people who knew him, and rare footage of Lewis speaking from his hospital bed after Selma. John Lewis offers unparalleled details about his personal and professional relationships and stands as the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the civil rights movement paved the way for a new era of freedom in America.

In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.

Praise for The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Extraordinary . . . a brilliant, painful, important book.--The New York Times

This book will have a permanent place in the literature of the Afro-American struggle.--I. F. Stone

With a Foreword by Simone Biles

The sensational two-time Olympian Jordan Chiles's heartfelt, inspiring memoir chronicling her unlikely path to the podium--including the unprecedented challenges, the joy of winning, the crushing pain of defeat, and the love and support of her devoted family and teammates that helps her stay strong.

It was a rare and stunning reversal: after the judges at the 2024 Paris Olympics determined that Jordan had rightfully scored third place for her performance--following a successful challenge by her coach--she earned the bronze medal. Later, Jordan's euphoria turned to devastation when the Court of Arbitration for Sport stripped her of that medal based on nothing but semantics. Jordan called the ruling, One of the most challenging moments of my career. Believe me when I say I have had many.

In her powerful, eye-opening memoir, Jordan digs deep, sharing the story of her life's challenges--the racism she encountered as a gifted Black girl in a predominantly white elite sport, the battles with body image and subsequent unhealthy relationship with food, the grueling practices, the injuries, the moments of nearly calling it quits. Through it all, Jordan refused to give up. Through sheer grit--and the love of her family--she kept working and winning. When Simone Biles stepped away from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a case of the twisties, Jordan stepped in to play a key role in securing silver for Team USA. And in Paris, Jordan made history as part of the first all-Black podium in all of men's and women's gymnastics.

Told with refreshing candor and Jordan's irrepressible spirit, I'm That Girl is a glimpse of life in the psychologically and physically demanding upper echelons of women's elite gymnastics. Exploring the deep bonds so often forged in pressure cookers, Jordan speaks openly about her relationships with her teammates, including her best friend and big sister Simone Biles, and how their support for one another has proved invaluable on and off the mat.

With the highs, lows, twists, and turns characteristic of the sport, and featuring a 16-page color photo insert, I'm That Girl reveals how one extraordinary young woman keeps her balance in a uniquely dizzying life. By way of her unwavering tenacity, Jordan has changed the culture of gymnastics, fighting every day to ensure that the girls she inspires are not pre-judged for their hair, their bodies, or their skin color. Insightful and deeply moving, I'm That Girl is a testament to the power of perseverance and the transformative joy of doing what you love, told by a fierce and unique individual who has been and will always be That Girl--the ultimate hype woman who shows up and gives it her all.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Brilliant and beautiful (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

From the National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand

Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she's America's Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.

Tiya Miles's extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman's life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it--a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones's right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: Who do you think you are?

Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family's past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors' lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth.

Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.

Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career. --Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King's time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago--outside Dixie--was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.

In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people's struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who--despite his flaws--depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.

King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks's central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King's life and work--a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.

In the segregated US of the mid-twentieth century, African-American travelers could have a hard time finding towns where they were legally allowed to stay at night and hotels, restaurants, and service stations willing to serve them. In 1936, Victor Hugo Green published the first annual volume of The Negro Motorist Green-Book, later renamed The Negro Travelers' Green Book. This facsimile of the 1940 edition brings you all the listings, articles, and advertisements aimed at the Black travelers trying to find their way across a country where they were so rarely welcome.Also available: The Negro Travelers' Green Book: 1954 Facsimile Edition

Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother's stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother's health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. Tell them about Papa Renty, she would say. It was her mother's last wish.

Thus begins one woman's remarkable commitment to document that story. Her discovery of a nineteenth-century daguerreotype at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read Renty, Congo. All at once, Lanier knew she was staring at the ancestor her mother told her so much about--Papa Renty.

In a compelling account covering more than a decade of her own research, Lanier takes us on her quest to prove her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty's that pits her in a legal battle against Harvard and its army of lawyers. The question is, who has claim to the stories, artifacts, and remnants of America's stained history--the institutions who acquired and housed them for generations, or the descendants who have survived?

From These Roots is not only a historical record of one woman's lineage but a call to justice that fights for all those demanding to reclaim, honor, and lay to rest the remains of mishandled lives and memories.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A Spectator Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the 2025 ASALH Book Prize

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X.

In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X's post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr's Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X's life (1925-1965). Parr traces Malcolm's African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures-at times brutal and at times instructional-of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told.

For all Harriet Tubman's accomplishments and the myriad books written about her, many gaps, errors, and misconceptions of her legendary life persist. One such fallacy is that Sarah H. (Hopkins) Bradford is to blame for omitted information in Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People and that she ended her second book too soon. But according to the Tubman family, it was Harriet's physical disability, the result of a head injury she incurred as a child, that left her unable to complete the necessary lengthy interview process with Sarah and properly flesh out the work.

Harriet Tubman: Military Scout and Tenacious Visionary sets out to rectify these omissions and many others. As recognition and tributes to Tubman's remarkable contributions to American history and civil liberty continues to grow, the time is right for a new biography with the involvement of her family, who have been the caretakers and stewards of her legacy for generations.

Just who was this remarkable woman? We might know the outlines of her story, but the deep research of Jean Marie Wiesen and rich family memory of Rita Daniels combine to form a nuanced and vibrant portrait of a historic figure we all thought we knew. Uncovering Harriet's ancestral roots in Ghana and exploring her time on the underground railroad, as a military scout, suffragette, and more, Harriet Tubman is an inspiring and illuminating narrative about a key figure in our history.

A New York Times Editor's Pick and Notable Book of the Year * An Essence Most Anticipated * A Lit Hub's Most Anticipated * An Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall * An Esquire Best Memoir of the Year * A San Francisco Chronicle New Book for a Season of Change * A Zibby Owens Most Anticipated * An NPR Books We Love *

Brilliant . . . stunning . . . deserves a place alongside modern classics like Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Tara Westover's Educated. --Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire

A triumph.--Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive, a writer takes on the conflict between the love that binds us to home and the desire to escape it for good.

On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie's mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness.

Digging into the events that led to her mother's break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can't finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal.

Spanning the globe from Houston's Third Ward to Paris to Tallinn and New York to Los Angeles, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of one woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Through honest stories and inspiring lessons from her life, A'ja Wilson reminds us to never doubt who we are or apologize for being true to ourselves. Dear Black Girls is a must-read for every Black girl out there. ―Gabrielle Union

This one is for all the girls with an apostrophe in their names.

This is for all the girls who are labeled too loud and too emotional.

This is for all the girls who are constantly asked, Oh, what did you do with your hair? That's new.

This is for my Black girls.

Despite gold medals, WNBA championships, and a list of accolades, A'ja Wilson knows how it feels to be swept under the rug--to not be heard, to not feel seen, to not be taken seriously. As a fourth grader going to a primarily white school in South Carolina, A'ja was told she'd have to stay outside for a classmate's birthday party. Huh? she asked. Because the birthday girl's father didn't like Black people.

Wilson tells stories like this, about how even when life tried to hold her down, it didn't stop her. She shares her contribution to The Talk, and how to keep fighting, all while igniting strength, passion, and joy. Dear Black Girls is a necessary and meaningful exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in America today--and a rallying cry to lift up women and girls everywhere.

​D​ear Black Girls is filled with phenomenal stories and empowering insight on what it means to be a woman in today's world. I didn't want to put it down. ―Tunde Oyeneyin, New York Times bestselling author of Speak

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries--tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light--in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

A searing tribute of sisterhood and family, profound love and loss from the acclaimed author of The World According to Fannie Davis.

In Love, Rita Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister Rita, who knew Bridgett before she knew herself. Just four years apart in age, as the two sisters grew into young adulthood they left behind their childhood rivalry and became best friends.

Rita was a vivacious woman who attended Fisk University at age sixteen, and went on to become a car test driver, an amateur belly dancer, an MBA, and later a popular special ed teacher; in doing so, she modeled for her younger sister Bridgett how to live boldly. And in the face of family tragedy, the two sisters leaned on each other to heal; their closeness grew, until Rita's life was cut short by lupus when she was forty-four. This led Bridgett to ask the simple, heartbreaking question: Why Rita?

Love, Rita is a brave and beautiful homage that not only celebrates the special, complex bond of sisterhood but also reveals what it is to live, and die, as a Black woman in America.

This moving memoir, full of joy and heartbreak, family history alongside American history, uses Rita's life as a lens to examine the persistent effects of racism in the lives of Black women--and the men they love. This poignant, deeply resonant portrait of an unforgettable woman and her impact on those she left behind is essential reading.

When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation.

Any serious effort to understand how the Black civil rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn how to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age twenty-nine, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida, school she had founded and which would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency, and she enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause.

Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune's shadow: her grandmother trained to be a teacher at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many community empowerment projects. The story of how Bethune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is, in Rooks's hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the stakes of the long struggle for full Black equality in this country are particularly evident--and centered on the state of Florida--it is a gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune's journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle.

MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart is one of the most recognizable faces in cable news. But long before that success, Capehart spent his boyhood growing up without his father, shuttling back and forth between New Jersey and rural Severn, North Carolina, contemplating the complexities of race and identity as they shifted around him. It was never easy bridging two worlds; whether being told he was too smart or not smart enough, too black or not black enough, Capehart struggled to find his place.

Then, an internship at The Today Show altered the course of his life, bringing him one step closer to his dream. From there, Capehart embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Yet Here I Am takes us along that journey, from his years at Carleton College, where he learns to embrace his identity as a gay, black man surrounded by a likeminded community; to his decision to come out to his family, risking rejection; and finally to his move to New York City, where time and again he stumbles and picks himself up as he blazes a path to become the familiar face in news we know today.

Honest and endearing, Yet Here I Am is an inspirational memoir of identity, opportunity, and of finding one's voice and purpose along the way.

Omo Moses has written an epic reaffirmation of Black diasporic life and a clarion call for justice. The White Peril is destined to be read and cherished.
--Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recipient and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

In The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice.

Omo was born in 1972 in Tanzania, where his parents had fled to escape targeted harassment by the US government. He did not encounter white supremacy until the family moved back to America when he was 4. Here, he learned what it meant to be Black. He came of age in a Black enclave of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a passionate basketball player, lived in the shadow of his father's Civil Rights work but did not feel like a part of it until his college basketball career came to an unceremonious end. Unsure what to do next, he took up his father's offer to go with him to Mississippi and teach math to Algebra Project students. Omo didn't know it yet, but it was among those young people that he would find his purpose.

This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses's demand for liberation.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS NON-FICTION PRIZE

A transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing.

In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America.

Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it--to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.

With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spirit--not to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verve--Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, love. It could be called a theory of life itself--a theory of being that will leave you open to the wonder of the world.