Black Studies

Sewing Circles, Dime Suppers, and W. E. B. Du Bois: A History of the Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church offers fresh insight into a small New England church’s role in the national civil rights movement. This is the original edition. An updated edition is also available, with the title The African American Community in Rural New England: W. E. B. Du Bois and His Boyhood Church.

The Souls of Black Folk is a founding text of the US civil rights movement, an inspiring work of literature and advocacy by a young man who drew on his own experience as a child in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a teacher in the hills of Tennessee, a father grieving after the death of his baby son. It is a book compiled in haste but nonetheless a command performance. Du Bois’s concept of African American duality is, writes Henry Louis Gates Jr., his “most important gift to the Black literary tradition.”

Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century brings into view over 130 other Black men and women who published poetry in America during the century between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Berkshire Edition includes a foreword by Jaki Shelton Green, 9th Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions, the second volume in the acclaimed Religion and Society series, breaks fresh ground on the subject of African and African-American religion and its influence throughout the world.