Residents of the South Bronx during its promising postwar decades tell their stories in their own words.In the 1930s, word spread in Harlem that there were spacious apartments for rent in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Landlords, desperate to avoid foreclosure, began putting signs in windows and placing ads in New York's black newspapers that said "We rent to select colored families"—by which they meant those with a securely employed wage earner and light com...

A Cotton Club dancer and Communist Party leader shares the story of his life in arts and activism from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights Era.Through his extraordinary life, Howard "Stretch" Johnson epitomized the generation of African Americans who broke through boundaries to make the United States more democratic. In this lively and engaging memoir, Johnson traces his path to becoming a dancer in Harlem's historic Cotton Club, a communist youth leade...

One man's "gripping" story of growing up in the South Bronx during an era of upheaval—and overcoming addiction to find success ( Library Journal).Allen Jones grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx at a time—the 1950s—when that neighborhood was a place of optimism and hope for upwardly mobile Black and Latino families. Brought up in a two-parent household, with many neighborhood mentors, Jones led an almost charmed life as a budding basketba...

An academic exposes how dominant education reform policies destabilize low-income communities.In this incisive collection of essays, educator and activist Mark Naison draws on years of research on Bronx history and his own experience on the front lines of the education wars to unapologetically defend teachers and students from education "reform" policies that undermine their power and creativity.Naison shows how dominant education policy systematically hurt...

"An exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem." — Booklist, starred reviewHarlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem's twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the firs...

New York Times bestselling author and living legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar shares how the power of the Harlem Renaissance led him to become the man he is today—basketball superstar, jazz enthusiast, historian, and Black American icon.In On the Shoulders of Giants, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar invites us on an extraordinarily personal journey back to his birthplace of Harlem through one of the greatest political, cultural, literary, and artistic movements in h...

With an additional 200 mind-boggling miscues and mealy-mouthed mea culpas, My Bad celebrates the best of this year's most exquisitely squirm-inducing pleas for forgiveness, from a variety of famous flubbers-Donald Rumsfield to Don Imus, Mel Gibson to Michael Richards-that proves public apologies are as American as pleading the Fifth.

There is no neighborhood in America as famous, infamous, and inspiring as Harlem. From its humble beginnings as a farming district and country retreat for the rich, Harlem grew to international prominence as the meccaof black art and culture, then fell from grace, despised as a crime-ridden slum and symbol of urban decay. But during all of these phases there was writing in Harlem—great writing that sprang from one of the richest and most unique communities in the world. From Harlem’...

NAACP Image Award Finalist: "Boyd's riveting new history…turns an oft-caricatured community into a world of actual, struggling human beings."—Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and MeA Michigan Notable Books HonoreeIn this book, the author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit—in "a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores...

Untold Glory offers a fresh perspective on one of the most fundamental elements of American history—the conquest of new frontiers. In twenty-seven fascinating first-person accounts, African Americans from different eras, backgrounds, and occupations explore and reflect on the meaning of frontier, both literally and metaphorically.This collection chronicles the search for freedom and opportunity and the achievement of success in a wide variety of fields. The contrib...

This unique volume uncovers the most fascinating and compelling stories from The New York Times about the city the paper calls home.More than 200 articles and an abundance of photographs, illustrations, maps, and graphs from the preeminent newspaper in the world take a look at the history and personality of the world's most influential city. Read firsthand accounts of the subway opening in 1904 and the day the Metrocard was introduced; the fall of Tammany H...

Irvin Muchnick - a widely published writer and nephew of the late, legendary St. Louis wrestling promoter Sam Muchnick - has produced a book unlike any other on the astonishing growth of professional wrestling and its profound impact on mainstream sports and society. In Wrestling Babylon , he traces the demise of wrestling's old Mafia-like territories and the rise of a national marketing base thanks to cable television, deregulation and a culture-wide nervous breakdown. Naturally, the figu...