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Jim Brown, a first-round NFL draft pick, played fullback for the Cleveland Browns until 1965. Born in 1936 in Georgia, Brown was a child of the Great Migration who faced racial discrimination throughout his football career. He formed the Negro Industrial and Economic Union in 1966, later known as the Black Economic Union (BEU), to advocate for civil rights. The BEU combined elements of the civil rights and Black Power movements with a call for African Americans to benefit from the United States' economic infrastructure through entrepreneurship and government programs.
In More Than an Athlete, author Robert A. Bennett III explores the BEU as part of Brown's legacy to answer larger questions about the role of Black athletes as activists, and how their activism impacted their careers and the movements they supported. The book examines the years following the famed 1964 meeting of Brown, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Sam Cooke, revealing how Black professional athletes leveraged their social capital in the fight for civil rights. Bennett provides life sketches of important BEU figures, highlights the experiences that shaped their political consciousnesses, and weaves the BEU mission in alongside ongoing organizing efforts of the era. A compelling analysis of the intersection of fame, sports, and race, More Than an Athlete is a thoughtful look at Black professional athletes' sustained contributions to social justice movements.
More Than An Athlete - Robert A. Bennett III
Published March 2026
Alternative Designs
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Black Appalachia: Race, Place, and Identity - Edited by Cicero M. Fain III, Wilburn Hayden Jr., and William H. Turner; Foreword by Ronald D Eller
Publishing September 2026
Black Appalachia: Race, Place, and Identity is the long-awaited successor to Blacks in Appalachia (1985), the first modern anthology to examine the socioeconomic, cultural, and political experiences of Black Appalachians. Edited by Cicero M. Fain III, Sheena Harris Hayes, Wilburn Hayden Jr., and William H. Turner, Black Appalachia features more than twenty-five emerging and established scholars and creatives who challenge how we think about the region by finding new answers to persistent questions.
Covering topics such as migration, discrimination, the arts, and the links between memory and place, this book demonstrates that Appalachia's Black residents maintain a significant role in shaping the region. It documents a renaissance of ideas, music, poetry, photography, and food and uses innovative scholarship, perspectives, and fields of inquiry to acknowledge the challenges and complexities of the Black experience in Appalachia, both historically and within a contemporary framework that addresses new realities.
Black Appalachia expands on the still largely untold story of Black America, reframing legacy and history, highlighting marginalized communities, and celebrating their contributions.
Alternative Designs
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In All That Teethes Within, poet Kari Gunter-Seymour translates the poignant complexity of loss into words. This exploration of heartache is layered with the poet's Appalachian identity and overflows with sadness and anger toward the forces that cause societal and environmental damage in the region. The poems mourn a loved one's sudden passing, opportunity missed due to poverty or gender inequality, and the piece of one's identity that vanishes or fades with age.
Gunter-Seymour's interrogation of grief and destruction quietly weaves in elements of nature—"Breezes whistle like wisps of memory / inside clusters of hemlock"—to counter profound pain. Small joys found in friendship, the land, grandchildren, and wildlife round out this collection. All That Teethes Within reckons with the incomprehensible reality of a sibling's suicide, serving as a guide for survival and a call to speak the truth of our anguish and our rapture
All That Teethes Within - Kari Gunter-Seymour
Publishing October 2026
Alternative Designs
Family Tree Illustration
But Where’s Home? - Toni Ann Johnson
Published February 2026
This illustration was included at the beginning of the book to show the relationships between the characters.
Family Tree Illustration
Still Family: William Still and the Legacy of the Underground Railroad - Valerie R. Still
Publishing April 2027
For this project, I was given two family trees from the author and tasked with cleaning them up for publication. See the before and after below.
