African American Memoris

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

A grandmother's theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It's time to get to know that God.

Following Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom, this third memoir by the iconic abolitionist expands on Douglass’s time in bondage, his escape, and his reinvention as an influential statesman—providing many details that, in earlier years, would have endangered himself and others. It also offers a fascinating window into Douglass’s political activism and his connections to major American figures of the mid-nineteenth century, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and three different US presidents.

In a series of incisive and intimate encounters Sarah Ladipo Manyika introduces some of the most distinguished Black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker. She searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

Over the course of more than twenty years, James D. Richardson and his wife, Lori, retraced the steps of his ancestor, George Richardson (1824-1911), across nine states, uncovering letters, diaries, and more memoirs hidden away. Their journey brought them to the brink of the racial divide in America, revealing how his great-great-grandfather Richardson played a role in the Underground Railroad, served as a chaplain to a Black Union regiment in the Civil War, and founded a college in Texas for the formerly enslaved.

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and Black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.

In a feat of remarkable research and timely reclamation, Eric K. Washington uncovers the nearly forgotten life of James H. Williams (1878-1948), the chief porter of Grand Central Terminal's Red Caps - a multitude of Harlem-based Black men whom he organized into the essential labor force of America's most august railroad station. Washington reveals that despite the highly racialized and often exploitative nature of the work, the Red Cap was a highly coveted job for college-bound Black men determined to join New York's bourgeoning middle class.

2016 Christopher Award Winner From acclaimed actor and producer Wendell Pierce, an insightful and poignant portrait of family, New Orleans and the transforming power of art. On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina barreled into New Orleans, devastating many of the city's...

Ninety years of American history as lived by the nation's preeminent African American historian and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally-protected racial segregation. A...

Foreword by Kim Kardashian West The true-life story of the woman whose life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking was commuted by President Donald Trump thanks to the efforts of Kim Kardashian West—an inspiring memoir of faith, hope, mercy, and gratitude. How do you hold on to hope after...

John Brown is a lightning rod of history. Yet he is poorly understood and most commonly described in stereotypes, as a madman, martyr, or enigma. Not until Patriotic Treason has a biography or history brought him so fully to life, in scintillating prose and moving detail, making his life and legacy - and the staggering sacrifices he made for his ideals - fascinatingly relevant to today's issues of social justice and to defining the line between activism and terrorism.

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.

The soul-stirring intersectional biography of the most famous Islamic woman theologian working today, from the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist author of If the Oceans Were Ink and Home, Land, Security. A fierce feminist, single mother of five, an advocate for and member of the LGBTQ+ community...

“Krak Teet” is a Gullah Geechee phrase meaning “to speak.” And the first-hand accounts in this book are transcribed directly from the grandchildren of the enslaved who laid the city’s treasured cobblestone roads and introduced its famous red rice and deviled crabs. Those who lived through what can be considered the country’s second wave of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Krak Teet catalogs stories of struggle alongside stories of success.

“Phenomenal.... A memoir that opens into the world, with brilliance, courage, and elegant prose.... This is a book to read, read again, and remember.”—Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson...

It was August 25, 2006, my first on-camera studio open for the CBS News broadcast 60 Minutes. Executive Producer Jeff Fager poked his head in the dressing room." Good luck, Brotha! You've come a long way to get here. You've earned it." …If only he knew. My mind flashed back to elementary...

From his enslavement to freedom, Frederick Douglass was one of America's most extraordinary champions of liberty and equality. Throughout his long life, Douglass was also a man of profound religious conviction. In this concise and original biography, D. H. Dilbeck offers a provocative interpretation of Douglass's life through the lens of his faith. In an era when the role of religion in public life is as contentious as ever, Dilbeck provides essential new perspective on Douglass's place in American history.

In Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP, Yvonne Ryan offers the first biography of this influential activist, as well as an analysis of his significant contributions to civil rights in America. While activists in Alabama were treading the highways between Selma and Montgomery, Wilkins was walking the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., working tirelessly in the background to ensure that the rights they fought for were protected through legislation and court rulings.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within 24 hours of the discovery of the murder, would be inextricably linked in the nation's imagination to an exceptionally brutal, modern-day lynching. In this superbly written examination of the murder and its aftermath, award-winning journalist Joyce King brings us on a journey that begins at the crime scene.