By Bruce Watson
In the summer of 1964, the civil rights movement was stalled.

A decade had passed since the team of attorneys from NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund had won Brown v. Board of Education, yet much of the South was still defying the landmark decision. Bombs, police dogs, and fire hoses had repelled marchers from Birmingham to St. Augustine, Florida. Martin Luther King, Jr. was reaching new heights of eloquence but he could not be everywhere at once. Something startling was needed to revive the movement. That something was Freedom Summer.

By Janet Singleton
“If you want to honor her, tell a story,” Keisha Washington told a Denver Post reporter about her aunt, storyteller Opalanga Pugh. For a quarter of a century, as a traditional Griot, she built her life on stories. Written about in publications like the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor and dubbed a “living legend” by an NBC show, Pugh was among only about 300 people in America who make their livings as fulltime storytellers, according the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

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 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 Eisa Ulen
Powder Necklace, a young adult chapter book by first-time novelist Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, explodes an awful reality for elite boarding school girls in Ghana. Despite the headmistress’ relentless insistence that her students are “duchesses” and the Dadaba Girls’ Secondary School is “The best” in the country, she can’t seem to summon the most basic of all human needs for the young women coming-of-age there: water. Forced to beg, borrow, and steal enough just to take a proper bath, Brew-Hammond’s characters face challenges most Western readers will find difficult to imagine – which makes the author’s decision to make the main character a British-born girl of Ghanaian descent a superb choice.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, historian Peniel E. Joseph examines President Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House, an almost unbelievable achievement that is still startling in its historic significance.

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.

By Janet Singleton
Today Bridges is 44, and it has been 17 years since the former Diff’rent Strokes star has been on the bad side of the barbed wire. Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted is an update. And even a person who finds narcissistic celeb bios routinely loathsome (such as the author of this review) can see value in Bridges’ tale.

By Grace Aneiza Ali
Perhaps it was the sight of Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Kamau Brathwaite, and Amiri Baraka huddled together around a table at the conference’s awards reception and chatting it up like old pals out on the town for a Saturday night dinner, that was the most memorable. Theirs was a moment of legends.