Twenty-five years after it made history as the first town in America to vote to desegregate schools, Teaneck, New Jersey, was faced with another kind of racial dilemma: In April 1990, a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager. Award-winning journalist Kelly writes the story of this community and the issues it now shares with many towns across the nation.

Inspired by true events, this gorgeous, haunting novel intertwines the lives of two Black female artists more than a century apart, both outsiders in Italy. It was the middle of the nineteenth century when Lafanu Brown audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for Black women, but she didn’t let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opportunity to study, travel, and follow her dreams, thanks to her indomitable spirit, but not without facing intolerance and violence. Now, in 1887, living in Rome as one of the city’s most established painters, she is ready to tell her fiancé about her difficult life, which began in a poor family forty years earlier. In 2019, an Italian art curator of Somali origin is desperately trying to bring to Europe her younger cousin, who is only sixteen and has already tried to reach Italy on a long, treacherous journey. While organizing an art exhibition that will combine the paintings of Lafanu Brown with the artworks of young migrants, the curator becomes more and more obsessed with the life and secrets of the nineteenth-century painter. Weaving together these two vibrant voices, Igiaba Scego has crafted a powerful exploration of what it means to be “other,” to be a woman, and particularly a Black woman, in a foreign country, yesterday and today.

Color Outside the Lines brings together diverse, talented YA voices, including Samira Ahmed, Adam Silvera, Anna-Marie McLemore, Lori Lee, and Elsie Chapman, to reflect on interracial relationships. While focusing predominantly on POC voices, the anthology also includes LGBTQ+, religious, minority, and disability intersectionality, and it's stories range in tone and genre, from light-hearted contemporary to darker fantasy.

Nobody's Burden: Lessons on Old Age from the Great Depression is the first book-length study of the experience of old-age during the Great Depression. Part history, part social critique, the contributors rely on archival research, social history, narrative study and theoretical analysis to argue that Americans today, as in the past, need to rethink old-age policy and accept their shared responsibility for elder care. The Great Depression serves as the cultural backdrop to this argument, illustrating that during times of social and economic crisis, society's ageism and the limitations in old-age care become all the more apparent. At the core of the book are vivid stories of specific men and women who applied for old-age pensions from a private foundation in Detroit, Michigan, between 1927 and 1933. Most applicants who received pensions became life-long clients, and their lives were documented in great detail by social workers employed by the foundation. These stories raise issues that elders and their families face today: the desire for independence and autonomy; the importance of having a place of one's own, despite financial and physical dependence; the fears of being and becoming a burden to one's self and others; and the combined effects of ageism, racism, sexism and classism over the life course of individuals and families. Contributors focus in particular on issues of gender and aging, as the majority of clients were women over 60, and all of the case workers - among the first geriatric social workers in the country -- were women in their 20s and early 30s. Nobody's Burden is unique not only in content, but also in method and form. The contributors were members of an archival research group devoted to the study of these case files. Research was conducted collaboratively and involved scholars from the humanities (English, folklore) and the social sciences (anthropology, communications, gerontology, political science, social work, and sociology).

"Thousands of low-income African-Americans, mostly women and children, began in 1976 to move out of Chicago's notorious public housing developments to its mostly white, middle-class suburbs." "They were part of the Gautreaux program, one of the largest court-ordered desegregation efforts in the country's history. Named for the Chicago activist Dorothy Gautreaux, the program formally ended in 1998, but is destined to play a vital role in national housing policy in years to come. In this book, Leonard Rubinowitz and James Rosenbaum tell the story of this unique experiment in racial, social, and economic integration, and examine the factors involved in implementing and sustaining mobility-based programs." "Today, with vouchers replacing public housing, the Gautreaux success story with its strong legacy is the most valuable record of the possibilities for poor people to enhance their life chances by relocating to places where opportunities are greater." --Book Jacket.

Coloring books became a thing when adults discovered how relaxing and meditative they were. Jigsaw puzzles roared back into popularity as an immersive activity, not to mention a great alternative to television. How exciting is it, then, to introduce an activity that tops them both: reverse coloring, which not only confers the mindful benefits of coloring and puzzling but energizes you to feel truly creative, even when you're weary and just want to zone out. It's so simple, yet so profoundly satisfying. Each page in The Reverse Coloring Book has the colors, and you draw the lines. Created by the artist Kendra Norton, these beautiful and whimsical watercolors provide a gentle visual guide so open-ended that the possibilities are limitless. Trace the shapes, draw in figures, doodle, shade, cover an area with dots. Be realistic, with a plan, or simply let your imagination drift, as if looking a clouds in the sky. Each page is an invitation to slow down, let go, and thoughtfully (or thoughtlessly) let your pen find its way over the image. The Reverse Coloring Book includes 50 original works of art, printed on sturdy paper that's single-sided and perforated. And unlike with traditional coloring books, all you need is a pen.

Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South. Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners' racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull--between segregationist cultural logics and music's disrespect of racially defined boundaries--is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.

The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear. Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear—voices, musical taste, volume—as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen—the sonic color line—and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.” Using an innovative multimedia archive spanning 100 years of American history (1845-1945) and several artistic genres—the slave narrative, opera, the novel, so-called “dialect stories,” folk and blues, early sound cinema, and radio drama—The Sonic Color Line explores how black thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By amplifying Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Charles Chesnutt, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ann Petry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lena Horne as agents and theorists of sound, Stoever provides a new perspective on key canonical works in African American literary history. In the process, she radically revises the established historiography of sound studies. The Sonic Color Line sounds out how Americans have created, heard, and resisted “race,” so that we may hear our contemporary world differently.

"Well-written, thoughtful, and incisive... A fresh look at why the armed services took so long to implement a policy imposed upon them by their civilian leaders." -- Journal of Military History

North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era. By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism. Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.