African American Biography

In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress, had no idea she was changing history when, fed up and tired, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in segregated Alabama. Today, she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight. Who was she, before and after her historic act, and how did that act sound the death knell for Jim Crow?

This chapter-book edition of the number-one New York Times best seller by luminaries Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds is an essential introduction to the history of racism and antiracism in America.

George Washington Carver wasn't just an inventor. He was also a botanist, a farmer, and a professor. Young listeners will discover how this teacher not only improved the way people farmed, but introduced the world to more than 300 uses for the peanut.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

Jim Gash's comfortable life as a Los Angeles lawyer and law professor nearly ensured that he and Henry, a Ugandan boy languishing in prison for two murders he didn't commit, would never meet. Henry was losing hope and prayed for a sign from God. Halfway around the world, Jim listened to best-selling author of Love Does Bob Goff encourage lawyers to use their legal training to help imprisoned children in Africa. Jim felt an irresistible urge to respond to this call.

From its founding in 1966 to contemporary attempts to censure its history and revise its significance, the Black Panther party has aroused fear, hope, pride, vilification, and government-sponsored oppression. This is the first and only collection of the most vital, representative writings of the party. Here are Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Fred Hampton; Kathleen Cleaver and other Panther women; the party's court battles and acquittals; its positions on black separatism, the power structure, the police, violence, education, and more.

In this classic work—a blend of memoir, social criticism, and political analysis that remains relevant today—the first Black Congresswoman to serve in American history, New York’s dynamic representative Shirley Chisholm, traces her extensive political struggle and examines the problems that have long plagued the American system of government.

Mississippi, 1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by a white mob after making flirtatious remarks to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Till's attackers were never convicted, but his lynching became one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history. It launched protests across the country, helped the NAACP gain thousands of members, and inspired famous activists like Rosa Parks to stand up and fight for equal rights for the first time.

Booker T. Washington’s 1901 autobiography can be read as a redemption story echoing many similar voices of its time. Starting from the humiliation he experienced as a slave, he ponders the meaning of identity in a situation that seeks to dehumanize. He furthers his story by expanding on his difficulties in obtaining an education and the need for change in our minds as well as societal structures.

As the former president of the student group Uncomfortable Learning at his alma mater, Williams College, Zachary Wood knows from experience about intellectual controversy. At school and beyond, there's no one Zach refuses to engage with simply because he disagrees with their beliefs - sometimes vehemently so - and this view has given him a unique platform in the media. But Zach has never shared the details of his own personal story. In Uncensored, he reveals for the first time how he grew up poor and Black in Washington, DC.

In this dual memoir, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano take turns telling how they went from tentative business partners to dear friends while turning a dilapidated formerly segregated Greyhound bus station into The Grey, now one of the most celebrated restaurants in the country. Recounting the trying process of building their restaurant business, they examine their most painful and joyous times, revealing how they came to understand their differences, recognize their biases, and continuously challenge themselves and each other to be better.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.

Farah Jasmine Griffin’s beloved father died when she was nine, bequeathing her an unparalleled inheritance in closets full of remarkable books and other records of Black genius. In Read Until You Understand - a line from a note he wrote to her - she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that framed the US Constitution and that inspired Malcolm X’s fervent speeches, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the artistry of Romare Bearden, and many others.

A testament to the importance of imagination, trusting oneself, and making space for your creativity, Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)? is a memoir of a '90s kid who confided in his imaginary sidekick to navigate everything from parallel pop culture universes, like watching Fresh Prince alongside John Hughes movies or listening to Ja Rule and Dave Matthews, to a lifetime of birthday disappointment (being a Christmas season Capricorn will do that to you) and hoop dreams gone bad.

The remarkable woman at heart of the smash New York Times best seller and Oscar-winning film Hidden Figures tells the full story of her life, including what it took to work at NASA, help land the first man on the moon, and live through a century of turmoil and change.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which was unavailable for more than 10 years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering.

As a boy, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendants of a highly accomplished, Virginia-descended family on his father, Bill’s, side, George felt called to live up to the family name. In contrast, his mother, Gerry’s, family were warm, down-to-earth country folk. Such contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing - Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. George interrogates these dualities in Where Beauty Survived and shows us how they shaped him as a poet and thinker.

One of the most important African-American leaders of the 20th century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned 50 years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle.

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’ ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’ work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative Black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible.