Publications

This illustrated biography captures the iconic moments of fifty African American women whose heroism and bravery rewrote the American story for the better. Download a student activity guide to continue the conversation!

We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity is a richly illustrated commemoration of African Americans' roles in World War I highlighting how the wartime experience reshaped their lives and their communities after they returned home. This stunning book presents artifacts, medals, and photographs alongside powerful essays that together highlight the efforts of African Americans during World War I. The book also presents the work of black citizens on the home front. Together their efforts laid the groundwork for later advances in the civil rights movement.

We Return Fighting reminds readers not only of the central role of African American soldiers in the war that first made their country a world power. It also reveals the way the conflict shaped African American identity and lent fuel to their longstanding efforts to demand full civil rights and to stake their place in the country's cultural and political landscape.

Since the 2016 opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, its Sweet Home Café has become a destination in its own right. Showcasing African American contributions to American cuisine, the café offers favorite dishes made with locally sourced ingredients, adding modern flavors and contemporary twists on classics. Now both readers and home cooks can partake of the café's bounty: drawing upon traditions of family and fellowship strengthened by shared meals. Sweet Home Café Cookbook: A Celebration of African American Cooking celebrates African American cooking through recipes served by the café itself and dishes inspired by foods from African American culture.

With 109 recipes, the sumptuous Sweet Home Café Cookbook takes readers on a deliciously unique journey. Presented here are the salads, sides, soups, snacks, sauces, main dishes, breads, and sweets that emerged in America as African, Caribbean, and European influences blended together. Featured recipes include Pea Tendril Salad, Fried Green Tomatoes, Hoppin' John, Sénégalaise Peanut Soup, Maryland Crab Cakes, Jamaican Grilled Jerk Chicken, Shrimp and Grits, Fried Chicken and Waffles, Pan Roasted Rainbow Trout, Hickory Smoked Pork Shoulder, Chow Chow, Banana Pudding, Chocolate Chess Pie, and many others. More than a collection of inviting recipes, this book illustrates the pivotal—and often overlooked—role that African Americans have played in creating and re-creating American foodways. Offering a deliciously new perspective on African American food and culinary culture, Sweet Home Café Cookbook is an absolute must-have.

Fighting for Freedom looks at African Americans in uniform, from the Civil War to the War in Iraq. This selection of photographs illustrates stories of patriotism, courage, and dignity, and explores the lives and challenges of African Americans in the United States military.

Essays include: Foreword by Lonnie Bunch; Pride in Service by Major General Charles F. Bolden Jr, USMC Retired; and Heroes and Trailblazers by Gail Lumet Buckley.

A book both factual and personal, From No Return: The 221-Year Journey of the Slave Ship São José recounts a portion of African American history as it is being made. Here is the story of the recovery in 2014 of artifacts from the São José, the first known slave ship to be recovered that sank with its human cargo aboard. Finding such a singular lens through which to view the unfathomable scope of the Middle Passage had become a quest for National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) founding director Lonnie Bunch. From No Return chronicles the efforts of NMAAHC and its collaborators to locate the ship and unearth its ungodly objects, including some of the 1,130 iron bars the São José crew used to balance the weight of the ship’s human cargo. The book contains full-page images of these artifacts along with reproductions of the ship’s manifest, the captain’s deposition after the ship capsized in December 1794 off the coast of South Africa, and other archival documents.

Bunch is one of four authors. The others are NMAAHC curator Paul Gardullo and the co-founders of the Slave Wrecks Project, Stephen C. Lubkemann and Jaco Jacqes Boshoff, who repeatedly dived the site. The “journey” that’s referenced in the book’s subtitle is threefold: the recovery of the artifacts; the symbolic return in 2015, by Bunch and the other authors, of those who had perished to their Mozambique homeland; and the personal journeys of the authors themselves as they unspooled this story from the turbulent waters off Cape Town. Each of them bore witness to a moment of discovery that will soon be part of history.

Hardcover; 124 pp., 10.25" x 9.25"; illustrated.

This book explores how this unparalleled museum found its place in the nation’s collective memory and on its public commons. Mabel O. Wilson explores how the "four pillars" of the museum's mission shaped its powerful structure, and she teases out the rich cultural symbols and homages layered into the design of the building and its surrounding landscape. This is an important inside look at the making of a monument.

Picturing Children features a diverse selection of photographs, including spontaneous records of intimate family moments, playtime, communal activities, and portraits. The images speak not only to the past, but also to our evolving concepts of childhood and the engagement of youth in our society.

Essays include: Foreword by Lonnie Bunch; Our Turn by Marian Wright Edelman; and Picture This by Ivory A. Toldson.

A re-release of limited-edition 1963 field recordings, breathes new life into Fannie Lou Hamer’s inspiring legacy and her uncompromising call for a righteous world.

Civil Rights and the Promise of Equality features iconic, as well as moving but less well-known, photographs of pivotal Civil Rights events with work by Spider Martin, Charles Moore, and Ernest Withers among other noteworthy and newly discovered photographers. 

Essays include: Foreword, by Lonnie Bunch; Portrait of a Revolution, by Congressman John Lewis; and Reflections for a New Generation, by Bryan Stevenson.

In A Life of Song, Ella Jenkins, “The First Lady of Children’s Music,” offers stories and songs that speak to her youthful years as an African American child in a multi-cultural world. Her career of more than a half century earned her the first Lifetime Achievement Grammy award for a children’s music artist, and her more than thirty recordings teach us to learn from one another while taking pride in our own heritage. This African American Legacy recording of Ella singing with children from the Cool Classics after-school program spotlights her own heritage while showing her delight for the traditions of others. 36 minutes, lyrics, photos, 28-page booklet.

In 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi, his grieving mother distributed to the press a gruesome photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, she explained that by witnessing with their own eyes the brutality of segregation and racism, Americans would be more likely to support the cause of racial justice. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” was her reply. The publication of the photograph inspired a generation of activists to join the civil rights movement.

Despite this extraordinary episode, the story of visual culture’s role in the modern civil rights movement is rarely included in its history. This is the first comprehensive examination of the ways images mattered in the struggle, and it investigates a broad range of media including photography, television, film, magazines, newspapers, and advertising.

These images were ever present and diverse: the startling footage of southern white aggression and black suffering that appeared night after night on television news programs; the photographs of black achievers and martyrs in Negro periodicals; the humble snapshot, no less powerful in its ability to edify and motivate. In each case, the war against racism was waged through pictures—millions of points of light, millions of potent weapons that forever changed a nation. Through vivid storytelling and incisive analysis, this powerful book allows us to see and understand the crucial role that visual culture played in forever changing a nation.

IndiVisible: African-Native Lives in the Americas, is a companion book to the exhibition of the same name which was produced in collaboration with the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Services. Throughout American history, people of combined African and Native American descent have often struggled for acceptance, not only from dominant cultures but also from their own communities. In this collection of twenty-seven groundbreaking essays, authors from across the Americas explore the complex personal histories and contemporary lives of people with a dual heritage that has rarely received attention as part of the multicultural landscape. Illustrated with seventy-five paintings, photographs, and drawings, the book brings to light an epic but little-known part of American history that speaks to present-day struggles for racial identity and understanding.