Black History Books

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

In 1961, Leonard Freed was on assignment in Berlin. He photographed a Black soldier standing in front of the wall. The irony of this soldier defending the USA on foreign soil while Black Americans at home were fighting for their civil rights was not lost on Freed. He returned to the States in 1963 to photograph the March on Washington and began a journey to document Black communities in the North and South living within a deeply segregated and racist country.

Leonard Freed’s seminal civil rights photo essay, Black in White America, was first published in 1968. This newly expanded and redesigned edition includes unseen photographs, as well as Freed’s most iconic images and is the definitive collection of his photographs from the time. The images have never been printed in such quality before, the clarity of print serving to bring home the singular power of Freed’s talent as a documentarian.

This extraordinary work includes pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, such as the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery marches. It is also a nuanced journey into the ordinary lives of a marginalized Black community living within a deeply divided nation. Freed was celebrated for his singular talent as a socially conscious photojournalist, and this essay conveys with power and dignity the exhausting, endless struggle of being Black in white America.

Leonard Freed (1929–2006) was an acclaimed American documentary photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos. Born and raised in working-class Brooklyn, Freed rose to prominence for his portrayal of societal and racial injustices, particularly in relation to the Black community during the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. He is also renowned for his photo-essays on the Jewish community in Amsterdam and Germany, the Yom Kippur War, Asian immigration in England, North Sea oil development, Spain after Franco and the New York police department in the 1970s, among others.

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, made a series of 60 small tempera paintings on the Great Migration, the decades-long mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915–16. The child of migrant parents, Lawrence worked partly from his own experience and partly from long research in his neighborhood library. The result was an epic narrative of the collective history of his people. Moving from scenes of terror and violence to images of great intimacy, and drawing on film, photography, political cartoons and other sources in popular culture, Lawrence created an innovative format of sequential panels, each image accompanied by a descriptive caption. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), Washington, DC, each institution acquiring 30 panels.

The Migration Series is now a landmark in the history of modern art. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, now in paperback, grounds Lawrence’s work in the cultural and political debates that shaped his art and demonstrates its relevance for artists and writers today. The series is reproduced in full; short texts accompanying each panel relate them to the history of the Migration and explore Lawrence’s technique and approach. Alongside scholarly essays, the book also includes 11 newly commissioned poems, by Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams and Kevin Young, that respond directly to the series. The distinguished poet Elizabeth Alexander edited and introduces the section.

Leah Dickerman is Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elsa Smithgall is Curator at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Jodi Roberts is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elizabeth Alexander is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Her most recent book of poetry is Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Graywolf Press, 2010).

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987) and a former United States Poet Laureate (1993–95). Her most recent book of poetry is Sonata Mulattica (W. W. Norton, 2009).

Nikky Finney is John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters, the University of South Carolina. She is a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for her book Head Off & Split (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011).Terrance Hayes is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a MacArthur Fellow (2014) and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for his book Lighthead (Penguin, 2010).Tyehimba Jess is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island in City University of New York. He is a winner of the National Poetry Series for his book leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005).

Yusef Komunyakaa is Global Distinguished Professor of English at New York University. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1994). His most recent book of poetry is The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet based in New York. Her most recent book of poetry is Living in the Love Economy(Overpass Books, 2014).

Natasha Trethewey is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2007) and a former United States Poet Laureate (2012–14). Her most recent book of poetry is Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University. Her most recent book of poetry is Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Crystal Williams is Associate Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer and Professor of English at Bates College. Her most recent book of poetry is Detroit as Barn(Lost Horse Press, 2014).

Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Previously, he was the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and Curator of Literary Collections and Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. His most recent book of poetry is Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014).

A Chicago Tribune 2020 holiday gift guide pick

AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) was founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1968 by a group of five young Black artists. Today, it is one of the oldest continuously active American art collectives. The pronunciation—Af-FREE-co-bruh—emphasizes the second syllable, signaling the group’s central principle grounded in Black liberation: creative expression reflecting the Black experience and Black influences.
AfriCOBRA’s founding artists—Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams—differed in disciplines and artistic vocabularies but were brought together by the common aspiration to create work that speaks directly to Black people utilizing an identifiably Black aesthetic. This publication celebrates the fifty-year anniversary of AfriCOBRA’s founding and marks the collective’s powerful relevance today. AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People documents two exhibitions curated by Jeffreen M. Hayes, PhD: one at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and another as an official collateral event of the 58th Venice Biennale. It features more than 80 works by the original members as well as those by Sherman Beck, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Omar Lama, Carolyn Mims Lawrence and Nelson Stevens.
More than a historical overview of AfriCOBRA, this book is a response to the artists’ continuing contributions and influence, connecting their works to the contemporary moment through essays, archival photographs and ephemera, exhibition views, and contemporary photographs that celebrate the impact of this revolutionary art collective. As their name states, the artists and artworks of AfriCOBRA were as relevant in 1968 as they are today in the continued struggle for Black liberation.

This book features more than 150 rarely seen images documenting the rise of hip hop in the early 1980s, taken by French photographer Sophie Bramly. Bramly lived in New York during this period and became firmly embedded in the emergent scene. The book features many stunning, intimate images of a star-studded roll call of legendary hip hop figures, all of whom were only just getting known or in their ascendency. These include Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmixer DST, Jazzy Jay, Red Alert, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow, Lisa Lee, the Fat Boys, Run-DMC, Beastie Boys and many more.

Bramly knew that hip hop was becoming a cultural force rather than just a musical fashion, and spent many hours photographing the four essential elements of this new world: the emcees, the deejays, the graffiti artists and the break dancers. Here you will see legendary graffiti artists captured at work and play, such as Keith Haring, Dondi, Futura, Phase One, Zephyr and Lady Pink, and break dancers including members of Magnificent Force, Dynamic Breakers and the Rock Steady Crew.

Bramly’s photographs also chronicle the desolate cityscapes from which hip hop emerged; the energy of the fans who first embraced hip hop; and the crucial players behind the scenes (Bill Laswell, Bernard Zekri, Rick Rubin, Fun Gallery co-owner Patti Astor).

Finally, this book also includes a bonus section documenting the rise of hip hop in Europe. Bramly returned to France in 1984 to find herself once again at the center of a new cultural phenomenon, helping bring the first US hip hop artists to Europe, including Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000, Rocksteady Crew and many more.

Named one of the best books of 2021 by The Financial Times

From the most avant-garde jazz musicians, visual artists and poets to architects, philosophers and writers, Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style charts a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted the clothing of a privileged elite and made it their own. It shows how a generation of men took the classic Ivy Look and made it cool, edgy and unpredictable in ways that continue to influence today's modern menswear.
Here you will see some famous, infamous and not so famous figures in Black culture such as Amiri Baraka, Charles White, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sidney Poitier, and how they reinvented Ivy and Prep fashion—the dominant looks of the time. The real stars of the book—the Oxford cloth button-down shirt, the hand-stitched loafer, the soft shoulder three-button jacket and the perennial repp tie—are all here. What Black Ivy explores is how these clothes are reframed and redefined by a stylish group of men from outside the mainstream, challenging the status quo, struggling for racial equality and civil rights.
Boasting the work of some of America's finest photographers and image-makers, this must-have tome is a celebration of how, regardless of the odds, great style always wins.

Lauded internationally for her narrative quilts and her colorful paintings of African American life, New York artist Faith Ringgold has explored and sabotaged perceptions of identity and gender inequality through her experiences in the feminist and civil rights movements.
This catalog is published for her international traveling exhibition organized by the Serpentine, London, which traveled to Bildmuseet, Sweden, in 2020 and opens at Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, in 2021. Focusing on several series of paintings, story quilts and political posters from the 1960s to today, the book includes two texts by Michele Wallace that interweave Ringgold’s biography with the chronology of works in the exhibition. In an extensive interview, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ringgold discuss her life in Harlem, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, her inspirations and her passion for storytelling and exercising her freedom of speech. The book also documents the expanded scope of the exhibition at the Glenstone Museum, which includes key examples of Ringgold’s soft sculpture and rare experiments with pure abstraction.
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. As an avid civil rights and gender equality activist, Ringgold’s work is highly political; in 2020, the New York Timesdescribed her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” She has had solo shows at Spectrum Gallery (1967), Studio Museum in Harlem (1984) and, most recently, a five-decade retrospective at the Serpentine (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

This dazzling tribute to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s 1974 boxing match in Kinshasa, Zaire, brings together the best of Norman Mailer’s classic commentary The Fight with color and black-and-white photographs from the two men who captured Ali like no one else: Neil Leifer and Howard L. Bingham.

First published as a signed Collector’s Edition, now available in an unlimited edition.

Hardcover, 11 x 13.3 in., 5.98 lb, 260 pages

A visual and conceptual conversation between two leading US photo-artists famed for their mutual explorations of race, class and power

Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems met in New York in the late 1970s, and over the next 45 years these close friends and colleagues have each produced unique and influential bodies of work around shared interests and concerns. This publication brings together over 140 photographs and video art from the 1970s through the 2010s by two of our most notable and influential photo-based artists.
Since first meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem five decades ago, Bey and Weems have maintained spirited and supportive mutual engagement while exploring and addressing similar themes: race, class, representation, and systems of power. Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue brings their work together in five thematic groupings to shed light on their unique creative visions and trajectories, and their shared concerns and principles.
Photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) had his first exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then, his work has been presented internationally to critical and popular acclaim. Recent large-scale exhibitions of his photographs have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London. Bey’s writings on his own and others’ work are included in Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply and Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. He is a professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago.
Famed for her Kitchen Table Series, among other works, Carrie Mae Weems(born 1953) explores power, class, Black identity, womanhood, and the historical past and its resonance in the present moment. In addition to photography, Weems creates video, performance and works of public art, and organizes thematic gatherings which bring together creative thinkers across a broad array of disciplines. Her work has been exhibited across the world, at venues such as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and the American Academy in Rome.

Since 1985, photographer Phyllis Galembo has traveled extensively to photograph sites of ritual dress in Africa and the Caribbean. In her latest body of work, collected in this new publication, Galembo turns to Mexico, where she captures cultural performances with a subterranean political edge. Using a direct, unaffected portrait style, Galembo captures her subjects informally posed but often strikingly attired in traditional or ritualistic dress.

Masking is a complex tradition in which the participants transcend the physical world and enter the spiritual realm. Masks, costumes and body paint transform the human body and encode a rich range of political, artistic, theatrical, social and religious meanings on the body. In her vibrant color photographs, Galembo highlights the artistry of the performers, how they use materials from their immediate environment to morph into a fantastical representation of themselves and an idealized vision of a mythical figure. In a gorgeous, fascinating photographic survey of Mexico’s masking practices, Galembo captures her subjects suspended between past, present and future, with their religious, political and cultural affiliations—their personal and collective identifications—displayed on their bodies.

Photographer Phyllis Galembo (born 1952) received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977, and was Professor in the Fine Arts Department of SUNY Albany from 1978 to 2018. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, Galembo has photographs in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. Her photographs of ritual masks in Africa, the Diaspora and beyond have been the subject of several monographic publications, including Maske(Aperture, 2016).

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee with the Muhammad Ali tribute GOAT: Greatest Of All Time, an epic edition including expert essays, interviews, and thousands of images.

A Great Turn in the Possible follows Weems’s muses, as they perform and re-enact life itself, as they occupy public space, as they challenge history and its scenarios, as they embrace the future and its conditions of possibility, as the artist seeks to generate a space for a new socio-political and cultural conversation, praising the efforts of the precursors, widening the path for the successors, and most of all, aspiring to a communal reimagination of a shared future.

Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo has built a practice synthesizing the ways that art both reflects and perpetuates the power of representation. Amoako Boafo is the first monograph to comprehensively examine the artist's career to date. Heavily illustrated and featuring original contributions by Osei Bonsu, Rachel Cargle, Mutombo Da Poet and Aja Monet, the book also presents an insightful and expansive conversation with the artist by Paul Schimmel.
Exclusively portraying individuals from the diaspora and beyond, Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, diversity and complexity. His portraits, notable for their bold colors and patterns, celebrate his subjects as a means to challenge portrayals that objectify and dehumanize Blackness. As Boafo has stated, “the primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness.”

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

From Air Jordan 1 to Air Presto, Nike and Virgil Abloh reinvented sneaker culture with their project, The Ten. Experience engineering ingenuity and Abloh’s investigative design process: each shoe is a piece of industrial design and a readymade sculpture. The binding on ICONS showcases an open spine, reflecting Abloh’s design philosophy.

Text by Hilton Als. Interview by Suzette McAvoy.

By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker—the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)—commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant.
Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant’s industry—critical to Pittsburgh’s history and character—by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks’ photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the FSA (1941–45) and Life magazine (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He died in 2006.