History of Racism – Tiya Miles and Nell Irvin Painter

Tiya Miles’s Night Flyer, a biography of Harriet Tubman, has been a finalist for multiple national book awards. Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. Nell Painter’s book, I Just Keep Talking, is a new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. It asks readers to reconsider ideas of race, politics, and identity. It assembles her writing for the first time into a single volume, displaying the breadth and depth of Painter’s decades-long historical inquiry and the evolution of Black political thought.

Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried. She is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth and her latest, I Just Keep Talking. She lives in Newark, New Jersey.

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