By Kenneth J. Cooper
For starters, I’ll concede Touré is right about a couple points he makes in his new book, “Who’s Afraid of Pot-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now.” There is no such thing as “authentic” or “legitimate” blackness. African Americans as a people have never empowered anyone to make those judgments.

By Lee A. Daniels
Their paths crossed for only a few moments that September day in 1957: Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan, two teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas who were supposed to be on their way to school.

By Martin Kilson
Isabel Wilkerson’s, The Warmth of Other Suns, adds another important book to the great tradition of serious writing on the interaction between American society’s white supremacist practices, on the one hand, and, on the other, the migration of black American citizens out of the viciously racist South to the North and West.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered is an innovative compilation of poetry, sound, and substance. Featuring Jonathan Gross, Ph.D., a Professor of English at DePaul University, and musician “Mack” Jay Jordan, who played with Ramsey Lewis and Nat King Cole during a decades-long career that took him around the world, this CD will appeal to jazz enthusiasts and educators, poets and poetry lovers, avid readers and admirers of all things Renaissance.

By Lee A. Daniels
Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin fleshes out this much-maligned group by focusing on two individuals whose lives as much as any in the small black haute-bourgeoisie that existed from the 1860s to the 1950s embodied the groups’ remarkable status.

By Lee A. Daniels
Why is there so much focus on the “heroism” of Atticus Finch in confronting the racism of the town’s (and region’s) legal system and so little discussion of the fact that he lost.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Damon Wayans, the second-eldest son in one of Black Hollywood’s most successful family dynasties has written the perfect summer beach read novel with surprising insights into and empathy for a demographic very different than his own.

By Janet Singleton
Throughout much of her childhood Deborah Lacks had no idea what became of her mother. Yet her mother even then, in the 50s and 60s, was famous. Random readers, undergrad science students, and ordinary lab technicians knew of HeLa: a still-growing cell line obtained from the cancerous cervical tumor of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died from the malignancy in 1951.

By Pamela Newkirk
Boyd died of lung cancer in November 2006 at age 56, but his memoir was shepherded to publication by his widow Robin Stone, a journalist and author who penned the afterword. The book traces a black man’s uncharted path from an impoverished childhood in St. Louis to an iconic American institution that both reflects and shapes the nation’s racial attitudes

By Deborah Rudacille
Martha Cooper’s iconic photos of graffiti-sprayed subway trains, hooded teens wielding cans of Krylon in deserted yards, and skinny kids twisting and flipping on flattened cardboard boxes on the streets helped introduce hip hop culture to the world—even though neither she nor the kids thought of it in those terms at the time.