African American Womens History

The Spirit of Harriet Tubman, who was called the Moses of her people, is rising again, and we can call forth her spirit to embody incredible strength and unwavering courage. Combining direct transmissions of Harriet's message with insightful explorations of her life and legacy, this...

Running from Bondage, Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America, explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.

In the new state of Oklahoma, young Sarah Rector was among the Black citizens of the Creek Nation granted land allotments. Her property seemed worthless—a distant plot fifty miles from her family’s two-room shack. Then oil was discovered, and eleven-year-old Sarah’s land was producing 2,500 barrels of oil per day. The sudden wealth transformed her family’s circumstances, moving them from poverty to prosperity. But such wealth in Black hands drew unwanted attention.

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman...

Two unsung women whose power using food as a political weapon during the civil rights movement was so great it brought the ire of government agents working against them. In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to...

The beauty and spirit of Maya Angelou’s words live on in this complete collection of poetry, including her inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning” Throughout her illustrious career in letters, Maya Angelou gifted, healed, and inspired the world with her words. Now the beauty and spirit...

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral...

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. Historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer.

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.

An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That...

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her...

A treatise of Black women’s transformative influence in media and society, placing them front and center in a new chapter of mainstream resistance and political engagement In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are...

“Super cinematic and every bit as Agatha Christie-esque as its sounds... ifyou like murder mysteries, pick this one up!” -Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers Named A Most Anticipated Mystery of Summer by Betches, Essence, Crime Reads and more! The glittering...

This program is read by the author. Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The...

Return To Source invites Black people around the world to reconnect with their lost heritage and findhealing, self-love and transformation.This audiobook is an empowering call to journey home to a new way of looking after yourself. A new way thatis, in fact, the old way.Globally, Africans and...

Blackboard bestselling author Beverly Jenkins delivers another lush historical novel featuring brothers that were first introduced in her award-winning novel Always and Forever. This is the story that readers have been waiting for. He was a wanted man. But no one wanted him more than she did...

The welcome return of Leonid McGill, Walter Mosley's NYC-based private eye, his East Coast foil to his immortal L.A.-based detective Easy Rawlins. As the Boston Globe raved, "A poignantly real character, [McGill is] not only the newest of the great fictional detectives, but also an incisive...

It was a normal day in high school, until one of my instructors began to lecture. That day, he used an inane theory to teach classrooms of students, most of whom were white, to believe that people of African descent were intellectually inferior. I didn’t believe him...Why, I wondered, were lies told about their intellectualism? I realized that these were the culprits and forerunners to intellectual colonialism which still exists in today’s academic environments and subsequent social cultures.

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman...

An essential guide to building transformative movements to address the challenges of our time, from one of the country’s leading organizers and a co-creator of Black Lives Matter “Excellent and provocative . . . a gateway [to] urgent debates.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New...