Collection: Shop Black

A warmhearted, "complex, believable, and always intriguing story" (The New York Journal of Books) that celebrates female friendship and second chances

This diner in Plainview, Indiana is home away from home for Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean. Dubbed "The Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they've weathered life's storms for over four decades and counseled one another through marriage and children, happiness and the blues

Now, however, they're about to face their most challenging year yet. Proud, talented Clarice is struggling to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband's humiliating infidelities; beautiful Barbara Jean is rocked by the tragic reverberations of a youthful love affair; and fearless Odette is about to embark on the most terrifying battle of her life.

With wit, style and sublime talent, Edward Kelsey Moore brings together three devoted allies in a warmhearted novel that celebrates female friendship and second chances.

A moving picture book about the history of Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas--and the origins of Juneteenth.

When people visit me, they are free--to run, play, gather, and rejoice.

They built me to remember.

On June 19, 1865, the 250,000 enslaved people of Texas learned they were free, ending slavery in the United States. This day was soon to be memorialized with the dedication of a park in Houston. The park was called Emancipation Park, and the day it honored would come to be known as Juneteenth.

In the voice and memory of the park itself--its fields and pools, its protests and cookouts, and, most of all, its people--the 150-year story of Emancipation Park is brought to life. Through lyrical text and vibrant artwork, Tonya Duncan Ellis and Jenin Mohammed have crafted an ode to the struggle, triumph, courage, and joy of Black America--and the promise of a people to remember.

In the bestselling tradition of The Notorious RBG comes a lively, informative, and illustrated tribute to one of the most exceptional women in American history--Harriet Tubman--a heroine whose fearlessness and activism still resonates today.

Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing struggle for civil rights. Now, National Book Award nominee Erica Armstrong Dunbar presents a fresh take on this American icon blending traditional biography, illustrations, photos, and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Tubman as never before.

Not only did Tubman help liberate hundreds of slaves, she was the first woman to lead an armed expedition during the Civil War, worked as a spy for the Union Army, was a fierce suffragist, and was an advocate for the aged. She Came to Slay reveals the many complexities and varied accomplishments of one of our nation's true heroes and offers an accessible and modern interpretation of Tubman's life that is both informative and engaging.

Filled with rare outtakes of commentary, an expansive timeline of Tubman's life, photos (both new and those in public domain), commissioned illustrations, and sections including "Harriet By the Numbers" (number of times she went back down south, approximately how many people she rescued, the bounty on her head) and "Harriet's Homies" (those who supported her over the years), She Came to Slay is a stunning and powerful mix of pop culture and scholarship and proves that Harriet Tubman is well deserving of her permanent place in our nation's history.

Discover the incredible story of a young daughter of immigrants who would grow up to be the first woman, first Black person, and first South Asian American ever elected Vice President of the United States in this moving picture book biography of Kamala Harris.

When Kamala Harris was young, she often accompanied her parents to civil rights marches--so many, in fact, that when her mother asked a frustrated Kamala what she wanted, the young girl responded with: "Freedom!"

As Kamala grew from a small girl in Oakland to a senator running for president, it was this long-fostered belief in freedom and justice for all people that shaped her into the inspiring figure she is today. From fighting for the use of a soccer field in middle school to fighting for the people of her home state in Congress, Senator Harris used her voice to speak up for what she believed in and for those who were otherwise unheard. And now this dedication has led her all the way to being elected Vice President of the United States.

Told in Nikki Grimes's stunning verse and featuring gorgeous illustrations by Laura Freeman, this picture book biography brings to life a story that shows all young people that the American dream can belong to all of us if we fight for one another.

An award-winning play from one of America's most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. - "A play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes, a roar of protest in its throat." --The New York Times

James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated--and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence, James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective--the tropes, the presumptions--Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

"I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body," Brookins writes. "Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I'm perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can't change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says 'female, ' and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean--to be a girl-turned-man when you're something else entirely?"

Informed by KB Brookins's personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency--whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as "other"

We Be Walkin' Blackly in the Deep, is a chapbook collection that begins the long journey of exploring all who sing blackly beneath the Atlantic Ocean. This chapbook collection begins to unearth and restore color to the white-washed notions about the dark and terrifying facets of American history.

Samuel is a fourteen-year-old enslaved African American in Brooklyn in 1776 when the fighting between the British and the colonists reaches his doorstep. "Liberty ain't for Africans," says fellow servants. "It got nothin' to do with us." But his friend Sana says, "Nobody here's gonna be free unless they take the risk." Soon the well-equipped Redcoats have trapped ragged American soldiers, who have no boats to escape, and a terrible storm blows up. Samuel, a strong boatman, must decide what he should do.

This fascinating book is packed full of dinosaur bones, Egyptian mummies and dozens of other curious objects. There are over 120 stickers to complete the scenes and bring each museum to life, including a science museum, costume museum, natural history museum and more. A great follow-up activity after a trip to a museum.

T'was the night before Christmas and all through houseA whole family slept soundly, three kids, two grandchildren, a husband and his spouse...Ezra "Ethic" Okafor and his family are finally complete. After years of loneliness Ethic has met his match in Alani. She's the queen of his castle and is a doting mother figure to his children. Only a few months have passed since they wed, but they've spent them happily and peacefully. Alani can't wait to start new traditions with her family and she is determined to make the twelve days before Christmas memorable for them all. Catch up with the Okafors as they spread a bit of nostalgia and some Christmas cheer in this surprise release by Ashley Antoinette. Grab a cup of hot chocolate, spike it with something strong (because that's the Ash Army way), hit play on the holiday playlist, and snuggle up by the fire as this novel gets you into the Christmas spirit. Merry Christmas Ash Army!

"The black experience in the antebellum South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the North are few. In the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work."--David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness

In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro Burial Ground." Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city.

In the Shadow of Slavery lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior studies of racial discrimination by tracing the undeniable impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community formation and by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers.

Written with clarity and grace, In the Shadow of Slavery is an ambitious new work that will prove indispensable to historians of the African American experience, as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.

Few campers at Camp Apple Hill Farm have found the mysterious cabin rumored to be hidden deep in the woods--but those who have whisper of a mysterious woman who tells tales of horrors beyond imagination. Are you brave enough to visit Cabin 23?

The last thing Tasha Washington wants is to move from her home in Savannah to a trailer park in Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia. But when her mother dies and Tasha is taken in by her father--a man she's never met, who abandoned her mom when Tasha was just a baby--she doesn't have much of a choice. At least, she thinks, she won't have to spend much time with him--something that becomes clear when he dumps Tasha with her grandmother and disappears to be with his new girlfriend.

The Shady Pines trailer park seems like a miserable place to spend a summer, even before an elderly neighbor suddenly passes away. But then Tasha meets a girl named Ellie who says she knows what really killed old Mr. Harold: a terrifying creature that stalks the trailer park at night, sucking the life from its victims. Tasha doesn't believe it, but when she discovers a book of hoodoo legends in her grandmother's trailer, and more people around Shady Pines start to appear unwell, she begins to fear the stories are true--and that danger is much closer than she thinks.

And don't miss the second book in the Tales from Cabin 23 series: Night of the Living Head!

A groundbreaking volume resituating the Harlem Renaissance as integral to the development of twentieth-century modernism

Beginning in the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of an explosion of art, writing, and ideas that has since become legendary. But what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the first movement of international modern art led by African Americans, extended far beyond New York City. This volume reexamines the Harlem Renaissance as part of a global flowering of Black creativity, with roots in the New Negro theories and aesthetics of Alain Locke, its founding philosopher, as well as the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Featuring artists such as Aaron Douglas, Charles Henry Alston, Augusta Savage, and William H. Johnson, who synthesized the expressive figuration of the European avant-garde with the aesthetics of African sculpture and folk art to render all aspects of African American city life, this publication also includes works by lesser-known contributors, including Laura Wheeler Waring and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., who took a more classical approach to depicting Black subjects with dignity, interiority, and gravitas. The works of New Negro artists active abroad are also examined in juxtaposition with those of their European and international African diasporan peers, from Germaine Casse and Ronald Moody to Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. This reframing of a celebrated cultural phenomenon shows how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(February 25-July 28, 2024)

The women have something to say. Are you listening?

In this powerful and needed collection, editor Angela P. Dodson brings together the voices of more than thirty-five accomplished women writers on the topic of violence and injustice against Black men. These writers are journalists, authors, scholars, ministers, psychologists, counselors, and other experts. They are also wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties, and friends. Each lends her voice to shine a new light on the injustices and dangers Black men face daily, and how women feel about the vulnerability of our sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, friends, and other males we care about as they navigate a world that often stereotypes and targets them. Contributors include:

-Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, poet, and author of The Light of the World

-Brenda M. Greene, founder and executive director of the Center for Black Literature, director of the National Black Writers Conference, and professor of English at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York

-Goldie Taylor, former US Marine, MSNBC contributor, author, and an editor at large of The Daily Beast

-Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Humanities Medal recipient, and author of Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns

-Charisse Jones, award-winning journalist and coauthor of eight books, including Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America and the New York Times bestselling memoir of Misty Copeland, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina

-Audrey Edwards, former executive editor of Essence magazine and the author of seven books, including the award-winning American Runaway: Black and Free in Paris in the Trump Years

-Michelle Duster, author, public historian, and great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells

-Sonya Ross, managing editor of Inside Climate News, founder of Black Women Unmuted, AP's first Black woman White House reporter, and first Black woman elected to the board of the White House Correspondents Association

-Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, contributing writer at The New Yorker, Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, author of Race for Profit, and editor of How We Get Free

-Donna Brazile, endowed chair of the Gwendolyn and Colbert King public policy lecture series at Howard University, member of USA Today's Board of Contributors, Fox News contributor, and author of Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

-Darnella Frazier, citizen journalist awarded a Pulitzer citation for her role filming the murder of George Floyd

The catalyst for a national conversation, this collection offers historical context that is often missing from public discussions and media coverage, while demonstrating an ongoing pattern of demonizing Black men that is rooted deep in the history of our nation. The essays in this book engage with the emotional toll anti-Black violence takes on women in particular and cast a vision for future activism.

Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse immerses readers in a small Vermont town in 1924 with this haunting and harrowing tale.

Witness joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!Leanora Sutter. Esther Hirsh. Merlin Van Tornhout. Johnny Reeves...These characters are among the unforgettable cast inhabiting a small Vermont town in 1924. A town that turns against its own when the Ku Klux Klan moves in. No one is safe, especially the two youngest, twelve-year-old Leanora, an African American girl, and six-year-old Esther, who is Jewish.In this story of a community on the brink of disaster, told through the haunting and impassioned voices of its inhabitants, Newbery Award winner Karen Hesse takes readers into the hearts and minds of those who bear witness.

A rare, lucidly composed screenplay from one of America's greatest writers, based on the bestselling classic The Autobiography of Malcolm X. - "Sharp.... Precise.... There is no questioning the depth and sincerity of Baldwin's admiration for Malcolm X." --The Times Literary Supplement

Son of a Baptist minister; New York City hustler; honor student; convicted criminal; powerful minister in the Nation of Islam; father and husband: Malcolm X transformed himself, time and again, in order to become one of the most feared, loved, and undeniably charismatic leaders of twentieth-century America. No one better represents the tumultuous times of his generation, and there is no one better to capture him and his milieu than James Baldwin. With spare, elegant, yet forceful dialogue and fresh, precise camera directions, Baldwin breathes cinematic life into this controversial and important figure, offering a new look at a man who changed himself in order to change the country.