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The first and only full biography on legendary Harlem gangster, Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the movies Cotton Club, Hoodlum, and American Gangster.

To his customers and neighbours on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife, Elizabeth, are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger and bigger all the time.

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change.

Author Ron Chepesiuk chronicles the little known history of organized crime in Harlem.

African American organized crime has had as significant an impact on its constituent community as Italian, Jewish, and Irish organized crime has had on theirs. Gangsters are every bit as colorful, intriguing, and powerful as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, and have a fascinating history in gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing. In the late 1800s, Harlem became a highly fashionable neighborhood.

In Harlem’s tumultuous history, there are many tragedies. For those growing up in this part of New York City, a young man known simply as Fritz from West 112th Street became an urban legend in Harlem. In the 1970s, Richard “Fritz” Simmons is introduced to the drug trade by an associate of the Lucchese crime family, one of the five families of La Cosa Nostra (the Mafia). After negotiating a deal with the Medellín Cartel, Fritz becomes New York’s Cocaine Consignment King. Harlem Holiday brings her inside scoop after almost three decades of silence.

A dark and witty work of hardboiled detective fiction set in the mean streets of New York, Chester Himes's A Rage in Harlem includes an introduction by Luc Sante in Penguin Modern Classics. Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for turning ten dollar bills into hundreds. But when the scheme somehow fails, Jackson is left broke, wanted by the police and desperately racing to get back both his money and his loving Imabelle.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

When the American Civil War finally drew to an end in 1865, victory for the North seemed to herald a new beginning for African Americans. Emancipation for thousands of former slaves appeared, for the first time, to offer people the chance of full and equal participation in American society. That dream didn't last for long, particularly in the Southern states where new Jim Crow laws prevented African Americans from exercising fundamental rights, including the right to vote.

100 years ago, artists and writers were forging new visions of Blackness—across America and abroad. Introducing Harlem Is Everywhere, a brand new podcast from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hear how music, fashion, literature, and art helped shape a modern Black identity. Presented alongside the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the podcast is hosted by writer and critic Jessica Lynne. This five-part series features a dynamic cast of speakers who reflect on the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance.

When Harlem gets off on a murder charge due to insanity, the asylum he’s sent to feels worse than death, with one exception: the beautiful Nurse Daphane. As their relationship grows, so do the stakes: She has the ability to help him escape, and he has the ability to set her free from her abusive relationship. Yet Harlem has one big secret: He was perfectly sane when he committed his crime. But in the end, Daphane’s own secret may be the deadliest of all....

In the late 1970s, a string of seemingly unconnected murders had Harlem police and federal authorities at their wits' end until they realized several commonalities. The victims were all either Mafia members or potential witnesses of Mafia activity and they'd all been shot from .22 pistols traced back to a single private sale in Florida. From these details, the FBI and police were able to build a profile of a rogue sect of Mafia hitmen known as the East Harlem Purple Gang.

New York City, uptown, Harlem. In the 1920s it was the most exciting place in the world. Poets, writers, dancers, and musicians all came together and invented a new American culture - a dazzling and revolutionary African American culture of music and poetry and art. Everyone who was anyone wanted to come to Harlem and hear the music of jazz genius Duke Ellington, the rap-like stylings of Langston Hughes, and the classical lyricism of Countee Cullen.

1936, September 17th, 1am… In the middle of Harlem, in the dead of night, a woman falls from a second storey window. In her hand, she holds a passport and the name written on it is Lena Aldridge… Nine days earlier… Lena arrived in Harlem less than two weeks ago, full of hope for her burgeoning romance with Will Goodman, the handsome musician she met on board the Queen Mary. Will has arranged for Lena to stay with friends of his, and this will give her the chance to find out if their relationship is going anywhere. But there is another reason she's in Harlem.

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.

Un grand roman sur le racisme, la violence, les combats pour les droits civiques, la place du Gospel, et l’amitié dans une langue crue, imagée et inoubliable.

Harlem 1969; it's the height of the Civil Rights era and the community is still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King. Arthur Mitchell, the first Black principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, takes his protest to the stage and establishes the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Here begins the story of the five extraordinary women at the heart of this book. This is a book about ballet, the enduring allure of ballet for young girls, and about how these pioneers broke into a world that was closed to them and changed ideas of what a classical dancer could be.

As the '20s roared and the Harlem renaissance thrived, a young woman from rural Florida became the toast of literary New York. Jump At The Sun chronicles the passionate life of Zora Neale Hurston (author of Their Eyes Are Watching God), who went from spinning tales on the front porch of a country store to writing prize-winning stories, novels, and plays. Imbued with the rhymes and rhythms of the Jazz Age, Hurston's story reveals a woman's ferocious appetite for life, literature, and love.

To hear Ethiopian and Swedish chef, TV personality, and restauranteur Marcus Samuelsson cook with special guests at the Red Rooster restaurant is to make an audio pilgrimage to Harlem. Listeners will get to know the iconic neighborhood, Marcus’ home, through its food, its history, and - most importantly - its people.

Artist. Public intellectual. Political activist. James Baldwin was all of these and more. Raised in the slums of Depression-era Harlem in New York City, Baldwin would become an author and activist of international renown—one whose legacy has continued long beyond his death in 1987. Who was James Baldwin? How did he become the master of multiple literary genres and a champion for some of the era’s most notable political and social causes? And how is his influence still being felt today?

Darius Linnet has it all. He's a top male model, he's traveled the world, and everyone wants to either be him or be with him. But would they really want to walk in his shoes? Because, when emotions consume him, heated sparks fly. When he sleeps, his dreams take on an otherworldly twist. And his perfect body - sometimes, it doesn't even feel like his own. Until, that is, he meets a group of sexy, mysterious men who claim they've been searching for him for centuries.