African American culture

Gather out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album is a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of tremendous artistic and cultural achievement among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, with New York City's Harlem neighborhood at its epicenter. The book is also based on a current exhibit of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

The 50 Most Influential Black Films is an introspective study of the black image in motion pictures from the late-19th century through the 20th century. Its chapters are organized by decades, starting with silent films and continuing through independent films of the 1990s. Each chapter begins with a synopsis of the social issues affecting black people during the period covered, and situates black film within the larger context of a people struggling to find their way in a culture that did not always accept the black image on screen.

Birth of the Cool may be the coolest book you will ever see. In this 2008 exhibition catalog of his first retrospective, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) distills black identity into powerful three-quarter and full-length portraits that teem with style and attitude. His sitters are unapologetic in their self-presentation and the result is a phenomenal elevation of African Americans who would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the decades immediately following the civil rights movement.

This book traces the development of gospel music, from its roots in the 1900s through its golden age in 1945-55. How Sweet the Sound takes the reader from African American churches in Los Angeles in 1906; to the Deep South Pentecostal churches; to Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis in the 1930s. Author Dr. Horace Boyer (1935-2009) was one of the foremost scholars in African American gospel music, a music historian, and a gospel singer himself.