Showing results for "The Race" in Art & Literature

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us. “A thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these...

On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world – a “home” – for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

An investigative reporter tells the harrowing story of three unsolved civil rights era murders and how he reopened these cold cases, ultimately bringing Klansmen to justice, decades after they'd gotten away with murder. “For almost two decades, investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell doggedly...

The reissued classic from “master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman—a “superb” (New York Times Book Review) memoir in five essays about fathers, and Wideman's vexed relationship with his own. An essential chronicler of Black American experience for over half a...

In sports, not all the long shots who succeed are athletes. In 1984, Tom Hammond, a forty-year-old sportscaster who had primarily worked in Kentucky and the Southeast, got an unlikely opportunity to appear on the NBC Sports telecast of the inaugural Breeders' Cup. Assigned to report from the stall area on what was supposed to be a single broadcast, Hammond performed so well that an NBC executive offered him a chance to call NFL games on the spot.

There was no reason to bet on Bruce Johnson, given where he started out. Poor, Black, and raised by a single mother who had a secret. He was the child she hid in plain view from the rest of her family. As an adult, he set out to just make a living - to do better than Black folks who tried their best before, while making his Momma and Grandmomma proud. His journey to becoming a successful TV journalist nearly killed him, but he refused to treat himself as a victim. His role was to use his voice and example to pull others out of deep waters. 

An African American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in 21st-century America.