“When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’” – Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette...

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

"In 2012, a seventeen-year-old African American boy named Trayvon Martin was murdered in cold blood by a neighborhood vigilante. When the murderer was acquitted, shockwaves ran through African American communities across the United States. The frustration over the perceived lack of value of African Americans in the United States spurred #BlackLivesMatter. The activist group mobilized as a rash of killings of unarmed African Americans by police seemed...