Black Forward

A strategic plan for the fight against the new Jim Crow and a passionate call to get involved.

From attacks on voting and civil rights to the wholesale defunding of Black institutions, Black America is facing a massive, generational attack that amounts to Jim Crow 2.0. Roland Martin argues that if we want to move forward against this backlash, we must look back at the Civil Rights movement and regain some of the solidarity and interdependence that brought Black organizations together to defeat the first Jim Crow.

Recognizing that we can only have power in groups, Black Forward builds off Martin Luther King Jr.’s final book Where Do We Go From Here, which lays out the “structured forces that can serve as the basis for building a powerful, united front” for liberation.

With chapters based on each of these structured forces, Martin mixes unforgettable stories from his own life with his inimitable and urgent style of blistering truthtelling as he lays out marching orders for Black neighborhoods, Black churches, Black media, Black social organizations, and Black businesses, showing how each has been deployed for Black liberation in the past and pointing out its potential for today. 

After reading this book we don’t get to sit out another election. We stop spending blindly and start supporting Black business, build Black institutions, and boycott those that do not work for our common good. No more rage without strategy. No more waiting on Washington—it’s time to turn our communities into our battlefield and make change where we stand.

Black Forward maps out a galvanizing plan that starts with your own block and reaches outward through our barbershops, church basements, and boardrooms toward a renewal of Black civic life.

• “For more than two decades, Roland S. Martin has been an unflinching voice in challenging Black America to move in a cohesive way to improve our standing. Black Forward is the book that we all must read, and then act on.”
  Tyler Perry
• "Few journalists, activists or media figures have spent time studying, listening to, and amplifying the voices of liberation-minded Black folk more than Roland Martin. Written by a veritable encyclopedia of political movements, institutions, and “the culture,” Martin has distilled decades of experience and knowledge into a manual informed by history, scholarship, and personal experience. Black Forward is more than just a book. It's an instruction manual for building systemic change and a road map to Black power."
  Michael Harriot, New York Times bestselling author of Black AF History
• “There is a difference between being given a platform and building one. Roland S. Martin knows that difference because he has spent years building independent Black media, creating opportunities for others, and investing in infrastructure our communities can own and control. That experience runs through Black Forward, a challenge to stop confusing individual success with collective progress and public attention with actual power. Roland reminds us that our history is filled with institutions that made freedom struggles possible, and that our future depends on what we are willing to build together. This book is a call for strategy, accountability, and the kind of organized power that can outlast any one leader or political moment.”
  Rashad Robinson, Social Justice leader, strategist, and bestselling author of From Presence to Power
• “Roland S. Martin has spent years unearthing, archiving, and amplifying the stories of our people and the blueprints of our times with independence and intention.  Black Forward brings those years of studied listening to all of our eyes and ears—so we can use these blueprints to get free.  The only way is forward, and Roland is determined to help us get there.”
  Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Activist & Host, UNDISTRACTED
• “Roland S. Martin understands both the power and potential of Black Americans to reconstruct a democracy that is not only better for us, but better for everyone. In the great tradition of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, he’s a journalist who tells the truth and makes it plain. The Bible says people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, but the opposite is also true: we are sustained and built up by the knowledge that brother Roland shares.”
  Bishop William J. Barber, II, author of White Poverty and The Third Reconstruction