Amid music festivals and moon landings, the tumultuous year of 1969 included an infamous case in the annals of criminal justice and Black liberation: the New York City Black Panther 21. Though some among the group had hardly even met one another, the 21 were rounded up by the FBI and New York Police Department in an attempt to disrupt and destroy the organization that was attracting young people around the world. Involving charges of conspiracy to commit violent acts, the Panther 21 trial—...

A memoir of a man and a movement, here is a defining and never-before-shared contribution to the story of Black PowerFreedom Fighter is the searing, urgent story of an elder statesman of Black political activism—whose story has never been fully told until now.A recently freed political prisoner who served a thirty-three-year sentence, Sekou Odinga is the co-founder of the New York Black Panther Party chapter and the person responsible for liberatin...

At a moment when the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement recites a daily 'We Have a Duty to Win' affirmation penned by exiled revolutionary Assata Shakur, the membership of the NY 21 is largely forgotten and unknown. Their legacy, however - reflected upon here in this special edition - provides essential truths which have remained largely hidden, even in the myriad books and movies of Black Panther nostalgia and mythology.

Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city’s streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders’ criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was widely circulated and published in...

Film star. Icon. Agitator. Martyr.Paul Robeson was a prize-winning scholar and the greatest footballer of his era, even before he ascended to global superstardom as a singer, Hollywood actor, and activist. The son of an escaped slave, Robeson stunned audiences with ‘Ol’ Man River’ and Othello, as his passion for social justice led him from Jazz Age Harlem to the mining towns of Wales, from the frontiers of the Spanish Civil War to Stalin’s Russia.C...

Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey'Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable' GuardianAt one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the 'black Moses' and merely 'a Negro with a hat', he masterminded the first International Convention of th...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An impassioned clarion call to return to the traditional values that served generations of civil rights heroes in order to overcome the obstacles faced by black Americans today“Written in the tradition of DuBois and King, Enough is an impressively powerful and courageous book.”—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the CrossHalf a century after brave Americans took t...

“Nonviolence is not the recourse of the weak but actually calls for an uncommon kind of strength; it is not a refraining from something but the engaging of a positive force,” renowned peace activist Michael Nagler writes. Here he offers a step-by-step guide to creatively using nonviolence to confront any problem and to build change movements capable of restructuring the very bedrock of society. Nagler identifies some specific tactical mistakes made by unsuccessful nonviolent actions such a...

'This extraordinary book is the roadmap for a new kind of effective activism' - Brian Eno'This book is for people who are angry with the ways things are and want to do something about it; for people who are frustrated with the system, or worried about the direction the country is going. Maybe they've been on a march, posted their opinions on social media, or shouted angrily at something they've seen on the news but don't feel like it's making any difference. It is ...

In this new edition of her bestseller, Jessica Williams tests the temperature of our world and diagnoses a malaise with some shocking symptoms. Get the facts but also the human side of the story on the world?s hunger, poverty, material and emotional deprivation; its human rights abuses and unimaginable wealth; the unstoppable rise of consumerism, mental illness, the drugs trade, corruption, gun culture, the abuse of our environment and more. The prognosis might look bleak, yet there is hop...

Winner of the Penderyn Music Book PrizeIn the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul...

Imagine the civil rights movement without freedom songs and the politics of women's movements without poetry. Or, more difficult yet, imagine an America unaffected by the cultural expressions and forms of the twentieth-century social movements that have shaped our nation. The first broad overview of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that express and helped shape them, The Art of Protest shows the vital importance of these movements to American culture. In comparative acco...