Black Lives

The rise and fall of one of America's first Black sports celebrities. Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes-and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy's troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy's personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1834/5) was one of the most charismatic, irascible, and radical intellectuals of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Born to an enslaved woman and a slavemaster in Jamaica, and moving in the radical working-class circles of London, Wedderburn made his name as a fiery political writer and orator-before dying, forgotten, in poverty. Among the few abolitionists bold enough to publicly call for the enslaved in the British West Indies to rise up and violently overthrow their colonial "masters," Wedderburn was also among the most outspoken and-amid an increasingly repressive British establishment-dangerous advocates for domestic political reform and working-class rights. From award-winning scholar Ryan Hanley, this is the first full-length biography of a man increasingly recognized as central to Black radical political thought in the Revolutionary Atlantic. Tapping newly rediscovered sources, Hanley details Wedderburn's extraordinary public and private life, explores the central influence of enslaved women on his political ideas, and offers fresh analysis of his contributions to British political thought and activism.

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a pivotal figure of the twentieth century, an influential author, intellectual, and activist who led a celebrated public life-and whose words and image and persona remain current in our culture. Baldwin's many incarnations have reemerged in the digital age as Baldwin's work becomes a touchstone for a new generation. It is the private, vulnerable, and messier Baldwin-the man behind the prophet and the online meme-who is the focus of this book. Magdalena J. Zaborowska draws on Baldwin's archives and material legacy-from his unpublished papers to his books to his house in France-to offer a fresh look at the writer's understated and obscured private life. Taking a cue from Baldwin's own love of the blues, Zaborowska presents his biography as a series of tracks on a vinyl record, introducing, developing, and remixing the themes and relationships from his life. She recounts episodes from Baldwin's troubled childhood, his struggles with sexuality and gender, his intimate relationships, and the overlooked influence of women, Jews, and queers on his writing. This Life Album revolves around Baldwin's development of a unique worldview, "Black queer humanism," premised on African diaspora aesthetics, resilience, joy, community, internationalism, activism, and justice.