African American Historical Fiction

It's 1969 when 15-year-old Huey Fairchild begins high school at Claremont Prep, one of New York City's most prestigious boys' schools. His mother had uprooted her family from their small hometown of Akersburg, Georgia, a few years earlier, leaving behind Huey's white father and the racial unrest that ran deeper than the Chattahoochee River. But for our sharp-tongued protagonist, forgetting the past is easier said than done. At Claremont, where the only other nonwhite person is the janitor, Huey quickly realizes that racism can lurk beneath even the nicest school uniform. After a momentary slip of his temper, Huey finds himself facing legal charges.

A solid marriage, a thriving business, and the esteem of their close-knit Alabama community - Joyce and Odell Watson have every reason to count their blessings. Their marriage has given well-off Joyce a chance at the family she's always wanted - and granted Odell a once-in-a-lifetime shot to escape grinding poverty. But all that respectability and status comes at a cost. Just once, Joyce and Odell want to break loose and taste life's wild side, without consequences.

Long before moving away from The Bottom, the poor black district of Beaumont, Arkansas, David and Mary Green yearn to escape the rural south and find a better life. The family steals away in the night, seeking a new beginning in St. Louis, Missouri. Even though St. Louis is more than they hoped for, their son, Otto, succumbs to the draw of the streets; he's lured into the dangerous world of bootlegging alcohol at the height of Prohibition.

Welcome to Bailey's Café, the most mythically real diner you've ever walked into. Presided over by Bailey and his helpmate, Nadine, it is a magnet that draws a wide variety of the "colored" people of 1948, each with a story to tell.

For college graduate Sidney Temple, the Roaring '20s bring opportunities even members of his accomplished black bourgeois family couldn't have imagined. His impulsive marriage to independent artist Loretta is a happiness he never thought he'd find. And when he's tapped by J. Edgar Hoover to be the FBI's first African American agent, he sees a once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure real justice.

Leo Love, and his only son, Michael, navigate their way through the cultural limitations and divisions that afflict American life. Starting from the 1950s and into the new millennium, their lives at times, cross with the lives of some of history's greatest icons. Joining their intellects and talent together, they become beacons for the doomsday clock. As champions for human rights, they wage war on ignorance through love and wisdom.

This book contextualizes the history of the Mormon migration with other events in American and particularly African American history. Few are aware that several black Mormon converts played important parts in the beginnings of Civil Rights issues from 1930 onward. Any listeners who want to broaden their understanding of African American history in the days from the American Revolution until just before the Civil War will find this book unique and full of information unavailable elsewhere.

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s.

Drawing on the 1898 overthrow of the Wilmington, North Carolina, government by white supremacists, Charles W. Chesnutt’s classic novel unmasked the racism of the post-Reconstruction South.

Two decades before the Civil War, a middle-class farmer named Samuel Maddox lies on his deathbed. Elsewhere in his Virginia home, a young woman named Kitty knows her life is about to change. She is one of the Maddox family's slaves - and Samuel's biological daughter. When Samuel's wife Mary inherits her husband's property, she will own Kitty, too, along with Kitty's three small children. After Samuel's death, Mary decides to grant Kitty and her children their freedom and travels with them to Pennsylvania, where she will file papers declaring Kitty's emancipation.

Kate, a recent college graduate, is still reeling from the deaths of her beloved parents when the discovery of hidden letters forces her to re-examine everything she knew about her family. Tacker, a young engineering student and all-around boy-hero, has returned from a West African odyssey where he fell in love with the local culture but was sent home in shame. Kate's and Tacker's stories come together when, on the same day and in different moments, they encounter a young African American man named Gaines. The relationship that develops between the three is complicated, as each one searches for love, freedom, and new beginnings.

A Charleston belle with slavery on her conscience. A slave with rebellion in her heart. In South Carolina in 1858, no friendship could be more dangerous.

Macklin, Mississippi has been rocked to its core by the death of David Moss, the son of one of the town’s most influential man. Some believe that David’s fate was sealed after many of the desperate choices he made. Can his family heal after such a devastating loss? After Linda decides to leave town again, Annie has to figure out how to live with the burden of raising the children her sister left behind.

When 11-year-old Langston's mother dies in 1946, he and his father leave rural Alabama for Chicago's brown belt as a part of what came to be known as the Great Migration. It's lonely in the small apartment with just the two of them, and Langston is bullied at school. But his new home has one fantastic thing. Unlike the whites-only library in Alabama, the local public library welcomes everyone. There, hiding out after school, Langston discovers another Langston, a poet whom he learns inspired his mother enough to name her only son after him.

Fourteen years after the end of slavery, Lord Henry Hardin and his wife, Lady Bertha, enjoy an entitled life in Union County, Arkansas. Until he faces a devastating reality: Bertha is unable to bear children. If Henry doesn't produce an heir, the American branch of his family name will die out. So Henry, desperate to preserve his aristocratic family lineage, does the unthinkable.

Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam - a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army - decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all "belonged".

Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his 10th birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals.

In 1899, 10-year-old Olivia Truluck’s home in Missouri is torched by the Ku Klux Klan. Olivia and her family leave the Show-me state to settle in the Greenwood District, north of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Starting with the 1905 Tulsa oil boom, both Blacks and Whites prosper, but tragedy comes with World War I, followed by the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave begin their lives as childhood friends, but that friendship is not bound to last. Belton (modeled on Booker T. Washington) is an African American integrationist; Bernard (modeled on W. E. B. Du Bois) is a biracial militant, and their lives, like their politics, quickly diverge. When they do meet again, at a Black nationalist community called “the Imperium,” the stakes could not be higher.

A young girl’s life is shattered when she is stolen from her African village in a midnight raid, ruthlessly torn from her family to be beaten, chained, degraded, and enslaved in a heartless world she can barely comprehend. The slave ledger at Virginia’s Belle Grove Plantation only reveals that Judah was purchased to be the cook, gave birth to 12 children, and died in April 1836. Brian C. Johnson’s important work of historical fiction goes beyond what is recorded to portray the depth, humanity, and vulnerability of a beautiful soul all but erased by history.