Before Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., there was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. -- the most celebrated and controversial black politician of his generation. An astute businessman known as "Mr. Civil Rights," he represented Harlem for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives. He was a man of the cloth and a civil rights leader, but Powell's reputation for flamboyance, arrogance, and womanizing made him his own worst enemy. In this towering and definitive biography, acclaimed journalist Wil Haygood paints a vivid portrait of one of black America's most memorable dignitaries.

This book offers a sympathetic and judicious portrait of Adam Clayton Powell (1908-1972), the flamboyant reverend and unapologetically arrogant yet morally principled champion of civil rights. This biography effectively chronicles Senator Powell's rise and fall.

Hundreds of stunning images from Black history have been buried in the New York Times photo archives for decades. Four Times staff members unearth these overlooked photographs and investigate the stories behind them in this remarkable collection. New York Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh made an unwitting discovery when she found dozens of never-before-published photographs from Black history in the crowded bins of the Times archives in 2016. She and three colleagues, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns, began exploring the often untold stories behind the images and chronicling them in a series entitled “Unpublished Black History” that was later published by the newspaper. Unseen showcases those photographs and digs even deeper into the Times’s archives to include 175 photographs and the stories behind them in this extraordinary collection. Among the entries is a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson leading an anti-discrimination rally in Chicago; Rosa Parks arriving at a Montgomery courthouse in Alabama; a candid shot of Aretha Franklin backstage at the Apollo Theater; Ralph Ellison on the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood; the firebombed home of Malcolm X; and a series by Don Hogan Charles, the first black photographer hired by the Times, capturing life in Harlem in the 1960s. Why were these striking photographs not published? Did the images not arrive in time to make the deadline? Were they pushed aside by the biases of editors, whether intentional or unintentional? Unseen dives deep into the Times’s archives to showcase this rare collection of photographs and stories for the very first time.

This is the memoir of the late Isabel Washington Powell -- Cotton Club dancer and movie star in the 1920's, political activist and "Queen of Harlem" in the 1930's and 40's, and the first wife of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. It is an exceptional story of the Harlem Renaissance and the early life of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. as the Pastor of the largest African-American church in the U.S. at the time -- Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, his early civil rights battles, his time as a member of the New York City Council and later running for Congress. Told by the woman who knew Adam best, much of this story has never been published before. Written as a first person narrative, "Adam's Belle" captures the reader's attention.

How forty-one women—including Dorothy Parker, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Lena Horne—were forced out of American television and radio in the 1950s “Red Scare.” At the dawn of the Cold War era, forty-one women working in American radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from their industry. The ostensible reason: so-called Communist influence. But in truth these women—among them Dorothy Parker, Lena Horne, and Gypsy Rose Lee—were, by nature of their diversity and ambition, a threat to the traditional portrayal of the American family on the airwaves. This book from Goldsmiths Press describes what American radio and television lost when these women were blacklisted, documenting their aspirations and achievements. Through original archival research and access to FBI blacklist documents, The Broadcast 41 details the blacklisted women's attempts in the 1930s and 1940s to depict America as diverse, complicated, and inclusive. The book tells a story about what happens when non-male, non-white perspectives are excluded from media industries, and it imagines what the new medium of television might have looked like had dissenting viewpoints not been eliminated at such a formative moment. The all-white, male-dominated Leave it to Beaver America about which conservative politicians wax nostalgic existed largely because of the forcible silencing of these forty-one women and others like them. For anyone concerned with the ways in which our cultural narrative is constructed, this book offers an urgent reminder of the myths we perpetuate when a select few dominate the airwaves.

This is a resource on racism and segregation in American life. The book is chronologically organized into five sections, each of which focuses on a different historical period in the story of Jim Crow: inventing, building, living, resisting, and dismantling.