This masterpiece by celebrated New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley is the mysterious story of a young Black man who agrees to an unusual bargain to save the home that has belonged to his family for generations.
The man at Charles Blakey's door has a proposition almost too strange for words. The stranger offers him $50,000 in cash to spend the summer in Charles's basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess...

A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas. After observing the varying reactions to the 1998 death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, called a lynching by some, denied by others, Ashraf Rushdy determined that to comprehend this event he needed to understand the long history of lynching in the United States. In this meticulously researched and accessibly written interpretive history,...

"Finalist for the Theatre Library Association Award for Outstanding Book in Recorded or Broadcast Performance" Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Film Studies Program. She is the author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible and Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Her edited volumes include Viewing Positions: Ways of...

"Waverly Duck and Anne Rawls propose in this book that when "tacit" racism becomes institutionalized in the expectations of ordinary interaction-in what the authors call "Interaction Orders of Race"--it creates vast amounts of largely invisible and unconscious inequality. Because of this, interactions can produce race inequality whether the people involved are aware of it or not. The resulting divisions and exclusions divide the nation, providing...

As the country enters a new era of conversations around race and the enduring impact of slavery, The Hairstons traces the rise and fall of the largest slaveholding family in the Old South as its descendants-both black and white-grapple with the twisted legacy of their past. Spanning two centuries of one family's history, The Hairstons tells the extraordinary story of the Hairston clan, once the wealthiest family in the Old South and the largest slaveholder...

This updated edition of the classic study examines life on the Texas-Mexico border, including the effects of NAFTA, drug violence, and immigration crises. Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados offers an authoritative portrait of the people of the South Texas/Northern Mexico borderlands. First published in 1999, the book is now extensively revised and updated to cover developments since 2000, including undocumented immigration, the drug wars, race...

"A new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity"--

In this pathbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when...

In this historically momentous memoir, the segregationist senator's mixed-race daughter speaks out about her life in the shadows. Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington–Williams comes forward with the dramatic story of her life. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, had been the nation's leading proponent of racial segregation. He famously undertook a twenty-four–hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957,...

In 1904, twelve-year-old Orphelia follows her dream by running away from home to join an all-black minstrel show headed for the Saint Louis World's Fair, and learns about her family's troubled past in the process.