The 48 Laws of Power was written by Robert Greene and first published in 1998. It is often praised as one of the best books to read if you want to get ahead in life. This got me to thinking, "why isn't there anything like this for our community?"We have a lot of people talking about what we need to do, what we should do, and what we could do as a community, but nothing con-crete that we could all sit down with, learn from, and relate to on an individual level. The 48 Laws of Black Empowerment was written to bridge the gap between individual action and a united black community. This book is broken down into six areas of importance to the black community.1.Personal2.Family3.Finance4.Community5.Philanthropy6.ActivismWorking to individually improve ourselves in these areas will automati-cally result in a shift in black community consciousness. While The 48 Laws of Power is a great book, it just wasn't written with our community or needs in mind. The 48 Laws of Black Empowerment is about cultivating success in business and life, while also helping our friends, family and community succeed with us.

Most Americans see the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the culmination of the civil rights movement. When the law was enacted, black voter registration in Mississippi soared. Few black candidates won office, however. In this book, Frank Parker describes black Mississippians' battle for meaningful voting rights, bringing the story up to 1986, when Mike Espy was elected as Mississippi's first black member of Congress in this century. To nullify the impact of the black vote, white Mississippi devised a political "massive resistance" strategy, adopting such disenfranchising devices as at-large elections, racial gerrymandering, making elective offices appointive, and revising the qualifications for candidates for public office. As legal challenges to these mechanisms mounted, Mississippi once again became the testing ground for deciding whether the promises of the Fifteenth Amendment would be fulfilled, and Parker describes the court battles that ensued until black voters obtained relief.

Jawanza Kunjufu examines how to keep black businesses and the more than $450 billion generated by them in the black community.

This book has been written primarily for social workers in training and in practice who are seeking more effective strategies for helping clients in black communities achieve personal and collective goals.

During and after the recent Los Angeles riots, many were asking where the effective leaders of urban black Americans were. Here Jennings (political science, U. of Massachusetts) traces the history of black political activists since the late 1960s, and weighs opinions that blacks are becoming disenchanted with or absorbed into white electoral politics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

How Black Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used media to prove their equality, not only in the eyes of God but in society. The institutional structures of white supremacy—slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration—require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief that racial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemption argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing the race by unabashedly claiming that blacks are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites—if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans’ rights to citizenship. If racism is a form of perception, then religious media has not only altered how others perceive blacks, but has also altered how blacks perceive themselves. Televised Redemption argues that black religious media has provided black Americans with new conceptual and practical tools for how to be in the world, and changed how black people are made intelligible and recognizable as moral citizens. In order to make these claims to black racial equality, this media has encouraged dispositional changes in adherents that were at times empowering and at other times repressive. From Christian televangelism to Muslim periodicals to Hebrew Israelite radio, Televised Redemption explores the complicated but critical redemptive history of African American religious media.