Black History Month 2024

A fascinating history celebrating Black players in Major League Baseball from the 1800s through today, with special insight into what the future may hold. In Beyond Baseball's Color Barrier: The Story of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Past, Present, and Future, Rocco Constantino chronicles the history of generations of ballplayers, showing how African Americans have influenced baseball from the 1800s to the present. He details how the color line was drawn, efforts made to erode it, and the progress towards Jackie Robinson's debut--including a pre-integration survey in which players unanimously promoted integration years before it actually happened...

An exploration of how engaging identity and cultural heritage can transform teaching and learning for Black women educators in the name of justice and freedom in the classroom In The Spirit of Our Work, Dr. Cynthia Dillard centers the spiritual lives of Black women educators and their students, arguing that spirituality has guided Black people throughout the diaspora.

The current debate over the causes and possible cures for the persistent white advantage over African Americans in education and income needs a resource that provides both historical and current evidence. In White Men's Law, Peter Irons fills this need with the stories of African Americans who challenged their status in acts of resistance, from slavery and Jim Crow segregation to today's Black Lives Matter and other racial justice movements. Irons marshals a wide array of evidence to make a persuasive argument that systemic racism still permeates every major institution in American society. White Men's Law is certain to provoke discussion on both sides of this debate, in readable and often graphic form.

A literary landmark- the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present...

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism...

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, "it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law- Constance Baker Motley" (CNN). The first major biography of one of our most influential judges-an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary-that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century. "A must-read for anyone who dares to believe that equal justice under the law is possible and is in search of a model for how to make it a reality." -Anita Hill

This rich cultural history of African Americans outlines their travails, triumphs, and achievements in negotiating individual and collective identities to overcome racism, slavery, and the legacies of these injustices from colonial times to the present...

Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history...