June 3, 2026

After Emancipation

Books on Freedom, History, and Black Life for Juneteenth 2026

These books explore how Black thinkers, writers, and artists have reimagined freedom from emancipation to the present day.

February 17, 2026

Cisco Bradley on I Hear Freedom

Cisco Bradley discusses how oral history anchors the book and why the Great Migration and Black freedom movements are essential to understanding the music.

February 19, 2015

The Other Blacklist — An Interview with Mary Helen Washington

Mary Helen Washington, author of “The Other Blacklist,” discusses how leftist politics shaped African American literature and culture.

April 9, 2014

Video: Mary Helen Washington on African American and the Communist Party

In the following video, Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, explains how her Catholic upbringing in the 1950s led to an interest in the relationship between African Americans...

April 8, 2014

Interview with Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

“I’m trying to restore that tradition of mid-century black left radical resistance, so that we don’t remember the 1950s only as the era of ‘integration’ but as the era of black civil rights radicalism. I’m restoring the other blacklist, the...