Black History

The untold story of African-born migrants and their vibrant African influence in Harlem. Africans in Harlem examines the intellectual, artistic, and creative exchanges between Africa and New York dating back to the 1910s, a story that has not been fully told until now.From Little Senegal, along 116th Street between Lenox Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, to the African street vendors on 125th Street, to African stores, restaurants, and businesses throughout the neighborhood, the African presence in Harlem has never been more active and visible than it is today.

The long overdue story of the Shakurs, persistent fighters in the U.S. struggle for racial justice, and one of the most prominent, influential and fiercely creative families in recent history For over fifty years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans.

Ballroom is an underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latino men and women of Harlem. Arts-based and intersectional, it transcends identity, acting as a fearless response to the systemic marginalization of minority populations.
TNS faculty author

New York City, 1929. In the pre-antibiotic days when tuber­culosis stirred people's darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York's largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay... But after arriving, they found themselves yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium. For twenty years, they risked their lives work­ing under appalling conditions. Despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system--and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculo­sis at Sea View--these nurses were completely erased from history.

This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods.

Memoir. With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own innovative, glamorous designs. But before he reinvented haute couture, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, and a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books.

The powerful story of two young men who changed the national debate about slavery. In the 1820s James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet, sons of enslaved mothers, met as schoolboys at the Mulberry Street New York African Free School, an educational experiment created by founding fathers who believed in freedom's power to transform the country. The story of their lives, their work, and their friendship testifies to the imagination and activism of the free black community that shaped the national journey toward freedom.

The expansion of the Black American middle class has transformed the cultural landscape of New York. Orly Clerge explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. Paying particular attention to the largest Black ethnic groups in the country, Black Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians, Clerge's ethnography draws on over 80 interviews with residents to examine the overlooked places where New York's middle class resides in Queens and Long Island.

Fiction. The Other Black Girl is an electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.
TNS alumna author

Addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor.