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Constructing a Black Curriculum reframes how we understand Black Americans’ intellectual and political engagement with education during the first half of the twentieth century. It traces the powerful, diffuse movement created by Black Americans to build what Nocera calls a “Black Curriculum:" a communal effort to represent Black identity, guide racial consciousness, and rebut claims of inferiority. This curriculum first developed as a public educational project in Black learned societies and during the Harlem Renaissance before making its way into schools. The struggle for a Black curriculum was not only a fight against white supremacy, but also an internal debate among Black advocates over the very nature of how race should be represented and taught. This book illuminates this struggle through the work of Black intellectuals (Alexander Crummell, Carter G. Woodson, Hubert Harrison, and Alain Locke) and the intellectual contributions of African American educators (Nannie Burroughs, Jane Dabney Shackelford, and Julia Davis). This essential history provides vital context for contemporary debates over curriculum reform, racial knowledge, and the enduring quest for educational equity.

Selections: Blue Door, by Tanya Barfield; Levee James, by S. M. Shephard-Massat; Hoodoo Love, by Katori Hall; Carnaval, by Nikkole Salter; Single Black Female, by Lisa B. Thompson; Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, by Lynn Nottage; BlackTop Sky, by Christina Anderson; Voyeurs de Venus, by Lydia Diamond; Fedra, by J. Nicole Brooks; and Uppa Creek: A Modern Anachronistic Parody in the Minstrel Tradition, by Keli Garrett.

Cradle of Freedom puts a human face on the story of the black American struggle for equality in Alabama during the 1960s. 

While exceptional leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and others rose up from the ranks and carved their places in history, the burden of the movement was not carried by them alone. It was fueled by the commitment and hard work of thousands of everyday people who decided that the time had come to take a stand.

Cradle of Freedom is tied to the chronology of pivotal events occurring in Alabama the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Bloody Sunday, and the Black Power movement in the Black Belt. Gaillard artfully interweaves fresh stories of ordinary people with the familiar ones of the civil rights icons. We learn about the ministers and lawyers, both black and white, who aided the movement in distinct ways at key points. We meet Vernon Johns, King's predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who first suggested boycotting the buses and who wrote later, "It is a heart strangely un-Christian that cannot thrill with joy when the least of men begin to pull in the direction of the stars." We hear from John Hulett who tells how terror of lynching forced him down into ditches whenever headlights appeared on a night road. We see the Edmund Pettus Bridge beatings from the perspective of marcher JoAnne Bland, who was only a child at the time. We learn of E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who helped organize the bus boycott and who later choked with emotion when, for the first time in his life, a white man extended his hand in greeting to him on a public street.

How these ordinary people rose to the challenges of an unfair system with a will and determination that changed their times forever is a fascinating and extraordinary story that Gaillard tells with his hallmark talent. Cradle of Freedom unfolds with the dramatic flow of a novel, yet it is based on meticulous research. With authority and grace, Gaillard explains how the southern state deemed the cradle of the Confederacy became with great struggle, some loss, and much hope the cradle of freedom.

Crate Missions takes readers inside the world of Hip Hop producers, where dusty record stores, forgotten albums, and decades-old recordings become the raw materials for new musical creation. Drawing on qualitative research, autoethnography, and oral history, Crate Missions combines the author’s more than twenty-five years of experience as a producer and DJ with interviews conducted with influential Hip Hop practitioners, including Pete Rock, Diamond D, Buckwild, Ski Beatz, K-Def, Mr. Walt and Evil Dee of the Beatminerz, and Breakbeat Lou. The online audio component allows readers to hear three new beats created by Rawls for this project, as well as “producer’s commentaries” in which Rawls walks listeners through his inspiration and process. Together, the text and audio reveal how crate digging is far more than collecting records—it is a form of historical discovery, cultural preservation, and creative expression.

In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights.

Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood

Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency.

Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.

Curriculum of the Mind is a groundbreaking hip-hop album that transforms the boundaries of scholarship, sound, and storytelling. A deeply personal and political intervention into the structures of higher education, the project speaks directly to the soul of education, identity, and cultural resilience. Part collective memoir, part mixtape, and part political manifesto, Curriculum of the Mind invites readers and listeners alike into a world where turntables become textbooks, beats carry the weight of history, and samples act as archives of Black life.

Produced by Stevie “Dr. View” Johnson, this album features the work of Black students, parents, creatives, and prospective college-goers who rarely see themselves reflected in academia. At the same time, it challenges educators, librarians, and institutions to rethink what learning looks and sounds like in the 21st century. The album draws from and contributes to interdisciplinary fields including Black studies, critical race theory, performance studies, and hip-hop pedagogy. Through powerful mashups and lyrical reflections, Dr. View and The Space Program explore themes of educational trauma, invisibility, intergenerational resilience, and the radical potential of sound as a vehicle for theorizing lived experience. Paired with a written preface, the project challenges the primacy of text-based knowledge, asserting that sound, emotion, and memory are equally valid forms of intellectual inquiry—and that scholarship can, and should, be a collective effort. As a model for the future of performance-based scholarship, Curriculum of the Mind proves that hip-hop is not only music—it’s a method, a memory, and a movement.