North Philly Notes

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight various Temple University Press titles for Black History Month.

The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black, by Michael E. Sawyer
Presents an alternative system of Black Radical Thought

Foundations of Black Epistemology: Knowledge Discourse in Africana Philosophy, by Adebayo Oluwayomi
Engaging with epistemological questions concerning the object and subject knowledge from the black philosophical perspective

Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth-Century New York City, by Alyssa Lopez
Explores Black New Yorkers’ early engagement with film and what it meant in the Black struggle for equality, inclusion, and modernity

Redefining the Political: Black Feminism and the Politics of Everyday Life, by Alex J. Moffett-Bateau
Assessing the political power of low-income Black women

Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, by Marilyn Sanders Mobley
Connects Toni Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics through the lens of spatial literary studies

Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy, by Amy Jane Cohen
Philadelphia’s Black history as seen through historical markers, monuments, murals, and more

BLAM! Black Lives Always Mattered!: Hidden African American Philadelphia of the Twentieth Century, by Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection; Foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III
This graphic novel tells the inspiring stories of 14 important Black Philadelphians

It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism, by David Steele
Examining American athletes’ activism for racial and social justice, on and off the field

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair: Nigrescence and Eudaimonia, by William E. Cross Jr.
On Blackness, identity formation, and the deconstruction of the deficit perspective on Black life

Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer
What freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America, by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin
Celebrating the life and times of the extraordinary Octavius Catto, and the first civil rights movement in America

Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith, by Tommie Smith and David Steele
The story of the most famous protest in sports history, written by one of the men who staged it

And forthcoming in 2026

Declaration House, edited by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Paul M. Farber, and Yolanda Wisher
Expanding our ideas and notions about who is counted among our American founders

The Power We Need Right Now: Black Sororities and Black Radical Movements of the 1970s, by Aisha A. Upton Azzam
Examines diverging Black sorority responses to activism in the post-civil rights era

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