"When President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the country's most visible Black man, Booker T. Washington, into his circle of counselors in 1901, the two confronted a shocking and violent wave of racist outrage. In the previous decade, Jim Crow laws had legalized discrimination in the South, eroding social and economic gains for former slaves. Lynching was on the rise, and Black Americans faced new barriers to voting. Slavery had been abolished, but...

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

Barack Obama's election in 2008 was a moment of true, unabashed hope. But after two terms shadowed by a growing white supremacist movement, Obama was replaced by an openly nativist administration. In this book, Wesley Lowery places a decade of American carnage in historical context, uncovering the horror that racial violence has wrought in our era. As he looks to America's past to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the 'whitelash' following the...

An award-winning historian shows how the experiences of the Black working class, from the earliest days of the republic to the essential worker of the Covid pandemic, is essential to a full understanding of the American story.