African American Life Series

Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens

Keith Gilyard

This first book-length study of John Oliver Killens aims to help secure his place in literary history and explores his creation of an inspiring Black vernacular art—one that ennobles people of African descent and urges their political liberation.

What Mama Said: An Epic Drama

Osonye Tess Onwueme

An explosive political drama projecting an African people’s revolutionary struggle to confront government forces and foreign oil corporations that have ravaged their land and strangled the voices of their mothers and daughters.

White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community

Ronald W. Walters

A study of the most racially conscious aspect of the Conservative movement and its impact on politics and current public policy.

Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson

Edited with a postscript by Ted Pearson and Kathryne V. Lindberg

From a poet whose vision and vistas embrace Detroit’s glass-strewn streets and soaring high-rises, this collection is universal yet site-specific in its evocation of jazz and its improvisations on the classics.

Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895–1994

Henry J. Pratt  •  Preface by Ronald Brown

This groundbreaking study analyzes the relationship between the two powerful forces—church organizations and urban politics—within New York City and Detroit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Caribbean Labor and Politics: Legacies of Cheddi Jagan and Michael Manley

Edited by Perry Mars and Alma H. Young

A pioneering collection of studies linking the political and labor backgrounds of two distinguished and dynamic leaders of the Caribbean and the Third World.