Joseph Vogel offers the first in-depth look at Baldwin's dynamic final decade of work. Delving into the writer's creative endeavors, crucial essays and articles, and the impassioned polemic The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Vogel finds Baldwin as prescient and fearless as ever. Baldwin's sustained grappling with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture revealed his gifts for media and cultural criticism. It also brought him into the fray on issues ranging from the Reagan-era culture wars to the New South, from the deterioration of inner cities to the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop culture gender-bending to the evolving women's and gay rights movements.

Astute and compelling, James Baldwin and the 1980s revives and redeems the final act of a great American writer.

An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.

Jim Crow is the figure that has long represented America’s imperfect union. When the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage in blackface as Jim Crow, during the 1830s, a ragged and charismatic trickster began channeling black folklore through American popular culture. This compact edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances that assembled backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. Quite contrary to Jim Crow’s reputation—which is to say, the term’s later meaning—these early acts undermine both racism and slavery. They celebrate an irresistibly attractive blackness in a young Republic that had failed to come together until Americans agreed to disagree over Jim Crow’s meaning.

As they permeated American popular culture, these distinctive themes formed a template which anticipated minstrel shows, vaudeville, ragtime, jazz, early talking film, and rock ‘n’ roll. They all show whites using rogue blackness to rehearse their mutual disaffection and uneven exclusion.

Mixing idealism with violence, abolitionist John Brown cut a wide swath across the United States before winding up in Virginia, where he led an attack on the U.S. armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Supported by a “provisional army” of 21 men, Brown hoped to rouse the slaves in Virginia to rebellion. But he was quickly captured and, after a short but stormy trial, hanged on December 2, 1859.

Brian McGinty provides the first comprehensive account of the trial, which raised important questions about jurisdiction, judicial fairness, and the nature of treason under the American constitutional system. After the jury returned its guilty verdict, an appeal was quickly disposed of, and the governor of Virginia refused to grant clemency. Brown met his death not as an enemy of the American people but as an enemy of Southern slaveholders.

Historians have long credited the Harpers Ferry raid with rousing the country to a fever pitch of sectionalism and accelerating the onset of the Civil War. McGinty sees Brown’s trial, rather than his raid, as the real turning point in the struggle between North and South. If Brown had been killed in Harpers Ferry (as he nearly was), or condemned to death in a summary court-martial, his raid would have had little effect. Because he survived to stand trial before a Virginia judge and jury, and argue the case against slavery with an eloquence that reverberated around the world, he became a symbol of the struggle to abolish slavery and a martyr to the cause of freedom.

Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League.

From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.

Timeless photos offer a rare portrait of the jubilant, vibrant, vital, nearly hidden, and now all-but-vanished world of small-town Black rodeos.

Long before Americans began to officially commemorate Juneteenth, in the heat of East Texas, saddles were being cinched, buckles shined, and lassoes adjusted for a day on the Black rodeo circuit in honor of the holiday. In the late 1970s, as they had been doing for generations, Black communities across the region held local rodeos for the talented cowboys and cowgirls who were segregated from the mainstream circuit. It was to these vibrant community events that bestselling Texas writer Sarah Bird, then a young photojournalist, found herself drawn.

In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird’s lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders—who still compete on today’s circuit—as “descendants” in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys. A gorgeous tribute to the ropers and riders—legends like Willie Thomas, Myrtis Dightman, Rufus Green, Bailey’s Prairie Kid, Archie Wycoff, and Calvin Greeley—as well as the secretaries, judges, and pick-up men and even the audience members who were as much family as fans, Juneteenth Rodeo ultimately seeks to put Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.

“[A] learned and thoughtful portrayal of the history of race relations in America…authoritative and highly readable…[An] impressive work.”
—Randall Kennedy, The Nation

“This comprehensive history…reminds us that the fight for justice requires our constant vigilance.”
—Ibram X. Kendi

“Remarkable for the breadth and depth of its historical and legal analysis…makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the US Supreme Court’s role in America’s difficult racial history.”
—Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Supreme Court’s race record—uplifting, distressing, and even disgraceful. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence, detailing the development of legal and constitutional doctrine, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings.

In addressing such issues as the changing interpretations of the Reconstruction amendments, Japanese internment in World War II, the exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries, and affirmative action, the authors bring doctrine to life by introducing the people and events at the heart of the story of race in the United States. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country’s promise of equal rights for all.