Books like Racial Matters by Kenneth O'Reilly

Cornel West’s Race Matters delivers a penetrating examination of racism, black consciousness, and civil society in the United States, offering essays that remain timely and relevant for every reader in the new millennium.

A historian examines the racial classifications of white people in the United States during the 18th century, revealing the tenuous nature of racial identity.

A comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party, featuring a new preface, and exploring key political questions and revealing the political dynamics that drove its explosive growth and eventual unraveling.

A history of the Black Power movement in the United States traces the origins and evolution of the influential movement and examines the ways in which Black Power redefined racial identity and culture. With the rallying cry of "Black Power!" in 1966, a group of black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, turned their backs on Martin Luther King's pacifism and, building on Malcolm X's legacy, pioneered a radical new approach to the fight for equality. [This book] is a history of the Black Power movement, that storied group of men and women who would become American icons of the struggle for racial equality. In the book, the author traces the history of the men and women of the movement, many of them famous or infamous, others forgotten. It begins in Harlem in the 1950s, where, despite the Cold War's hostile climate, black writers, artists, and activists built a new urban militancy that was the movement's earliest incarnation. In a series of character driven chapters, we witness the rise of Black Power groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, and with them, on both coasts of the country, a fundamental change in the way Americans understood the unfinished business of racial equality and integration. The book invokes the way in which Black Power redefined black identity and culture and in the process redrew the landscape of American race relations.

In The Future of the Race, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West examine W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of the Talented Tenth and its relevance for the African‑American elite as the nation confronts social, economic, and racial change at the turn of the 21st century.

The Black Power Movement remains an enigma. Often misunderstood and ill-defined, this radical movement is now beginning to receive sustained and serious scholarly attention. Peniel Joseph has collected the freshest and most impressive list of contributors around to write original essays on the Black Power Movement. Taken together they provide a critical and much needed historical overview of the Black Power era. Offering important examples of undocumented histories of black liberation, this volume offers both powerful and poignant examples of "Black Power Studies" scholarship.