African American Biography

In this historic memoir, Lee reflects on her life, her spiritual transformation, and her critical role in the Second Great Awakening - a movement that initiated a number of reforms. Today, it remains an important chronicle of faith and an invaluable record of a pioneer who broke through barriers of race, gender, and institutional inertia.

JFK issued the historic moon landing challenge. These are the stories of the visionaries who helped America complete his vision with the first lunar landing fifty years ago...

The Obama White House staff invites us behind-the-scenes of history for a deeply personal and moving look at the presidency and how a president's staff can change the nation When we elect a president, we elect with them an entire team that will join them in the West Wing to help run the country...

Meet. Love. Break. Recover. That’s been the routine of Staceyann Chin’s romantic life. But at 35, after yet another devasting breakup and overcome by an urgent and all-consuming desire to have a child, Chin realizes she’s running out of time. So she sets her sights on a single target: motherhood.

This heartfelt picture book biography, adapted for audio, tells the story of MaVynee Betsch, an African American opera singer turned environmentalist and the legacy she preserved. MaVynee loved going to the beach. But in the days of Jim Crow, she couldn't just go to any beach--most of the...

Starting with Lucy Terry of the early 18th century and finishing with poet laureate Rita Dove, this inspiring anthology edited by Catherine Clinton captures the enormous talent and passion of black poets. Powerful and diverse, I, Too, Sing America is a forum for voices baring their souls, speaking their minds, tracing their roots, and proclaiming their dreams.

Bill Russell was not the first African American to play professional basketball, but he was its first Black superstar. From the moment he stepped onto the court of the Boston Garden in 1956, Russell began to transform the sport in a fundamental way, making him, more than any of his contemporaries, the Jackie Robinson of basketball. In King of the Court, Aram Goudsouzian provides a vivid and engrossing chronicle of the life and career of this brilliant champion and courageous racial pioneer. Russell's leaping, wide-ranging defense altered the game's texture.

The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles—a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story The first time Chude-Sokei realizes that he is “first son...

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and...

The Names of All the Flowers connects one tragic death to a collective grief for all Black people who die too young. A lyrical recounting of a life lost, Melissa Valentine’s debut memoir is an intimate portrait of a family fractured by the school-to-prison pipeline and an enduring love letter to an adored older brother. It is a call for justice amid endless cycles of violence, grief, and trauma, declaring: “We are all witness and therefore no one is spared from this loss.”

From a fierce and humorous new voice comes a relevant, insightful, and riveting collection of personal essays on the richness and resilience of black girl culture—for readers of Samantha Irby, Roxane Gay, Morgan Jerkins, and Lindy West. Shayla Lawson is major. You don’t know who she is. Yet...

As a 14-year-old, he was Malcolm Little, the president of his class and a top student. At 16, he was hustling tips at a Boston nightclub. In Harlem, he was known as Detroit Red, a slick street operator. At 19, he was back in Boston, leading a gang of burglars. At 20, he was in prison. It was in prison that Malcolm Little started the journey that would lead him to adopt the name Malcolm X, and there he developed his beliefs about what being Black means in America: beliefs that shook America then and still shake America today.

Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.

You can sparkle, shimmer, shine – just like Marsha did. This vibrant and joyful audiobook celebrates the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman and activist who played an instrumental role during the Stonewall Riots that lead to PRIDE month, written by award-winning filmmaker and...

Dr. Ben Carson is known as the originator of groundbreaking surgical procedures and a doctor who turns impossible hopes into joyous realities. But where does this incredible drive and focus come from? According to Dr. Carson himself, the answer is simple: The Big Picture. Every day when Dr...

We all feel it, the teetering toward a place in America from which there is no return. The battle to remain hopeful in spite of injustice after injustice. In this powerful story of one lawyer’s fight for his community, both justice and hope are redeemed. The Greenwood neighborhood of North...

The Original Black Elite has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...

A vibrant, revealing portrait of the "King of Calypso," whose extraordinary performing career and activism helped remake America through the civil rights era and beyond Even three years after his death, Harry Belafonte is everywhere. You can’t go to a wedding, or to Yankee stadium, without...

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.