Black History Month 2025

Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms...

"It is long past time to recognize Black excellence in the culinary world the same way it has been celebrated in the worlds of music, sports, literature, film, and the arts. Black cooks and creators have led American culture forward with indelible contributions of artistry and ingenuity from the start, but Black authorship has been consistently erased from the story of American food. Now, in The Rise, chef, author, and television star Marcus Samuelsson...

"In these eight ... explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and ... author of Lower Ed--embraces her ... role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society"--Dust jacket flap.

"Claiming Kin is a story about a woman's quest to discover her roots upon the death of the father she barely knew. A former journalist hungry for the truth, she conducted a search into the past that led her from her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, back to the birthplace of the Scruggs family in nearby Williamson County. There she traced the family back to 1847 and the Scruggs farm, where her ancestors were once slaves. Her journey soon became a...

"A nonfiction book detailing the case of Isaac Woodard, its influence on Judge J. Waties Waring, and how Waring went on to lay the groundwork for landmark civil rights rulings"-- Provided by publisher.

Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where...

The co-founder of VerySmartBrothas.com presents a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the direct impact of racism on his life, the shifting definition of black male identity, and the ongoing realities of white supremacy.

"Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance...

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...