In 1954, 13-year-old Jubie, traveling with her family and her family's black maid Mary Luther--who has always been there for her, making up for her father's rages and her mother's neglect--encounters racial tension and tragedy.

Explores why it is important for white educators to affirm the identities of African American students, and discusses how the prevalence of racial stereotypes acts as a major psychological challenge uniquely facing African Americans. Major new reflections on race and schools, Beverly Daniel Tatum emerged on the national scene in 1997 with "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?," a book that spoke to a wide audience about the...

"In an era characterized by levels of school segregation the country has not seen since the mid-twentieth century, cultural critic and American studies professor Noliwe Rooks provides a trenchant analysis of our separate and unequal schools and argues that profiting from our nation’s failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business. As our public education infrastructure crumbles, Rooks’s book manages...

"Saoirse Sorkova survives on lies. As a soldier-in-training at the most prestigious barracks in the kingdom, she lies about being a siren to avoid execution. At night, working as an assassin for a dangerous group of mercenaries, Saoirse lies about her true identity. And to her family, Saoirse tells the biggest lie of all: that she can control her siren powers and doesn't struggle constantly against an impulse to kill. As the top trainee in her class,...

Publisher's description: Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In this book, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had - raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters,...

"This book discusses the long history of the deleterious effects of racial segregation on health in the United States. Author Brown puts Baltimore under a microscope because Baltimore was the first city in America to enact segregationist legislation and because it remains hypersegregated to this day. "Black butterfly" describes the shape of a demographic map that plots Baltimore's population by race: a white central axis with black wings east and...

Historian Litwack constructs an account of life in the Jim Crow South. Drawing on an array of contemporary documents and first-person narratives from both blacks and whites, he examines how black men and women learned to live with the severe restrictions imposed on their lives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Litwack relates how black schools and colleges struggled to fulfill the expectations placed on them in a climate that...

When America inaugurated its first African American president in 2009, many felt the country had finally become a "post-racial" society. Higginbotham argues that the shadows of Jim Crow era laws and attitudes continue to perpetuate insidious, systemic prejudice and racism in the 21st century. He demonstrates how laws and actions have been used to maintain a racial paradigm of hierarchy and separation-- both historically, in the era of lynch mobs and...

"Though not as widely known as other basketball legends, hall-of-famer Elgin Baylor was one of the game's all-time greatest players--an innovative athlete, team player, and quiet force for change. A member of the early, scrappy NBA and one of the first professional African American players, Elgin (b. 1934) played in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the Minneapolis/Los Angeles Lakers, taking risks on and off the court. Known for his acrobatic style...

Few words are as ideologically charged as "ghetto." It was initially synonymous with two cities: Venice, where the word was first used in conjunction with the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived as a compulsory institution until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery word,...