African American Biography

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.

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty.

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism, and selected correspondences, including more than 30 previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. This volume will introduce a new generation to an educator, intellectual, and activist whose prescient insights underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American activism.

Condoleezza Rice has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer. In this stunning new biography, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller peels back the layers and presents a revelatory portrait of the first Black female secretary of state and President George W. Bush's national security adviser on September 11, 2001. The audiobook relates the personal voyage of a young Black woman out of the segregated American South and also tells the sweeping story of a tumultuous half-century in the nation's history.

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler's development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena.

Maggie Comer was a poor, uneducated mother of five who believed that the only way her children were going to make something of themselves in the world was through education. Fighting obstacles such as racism, oppression, poverty, hardship, and World War II, Maggie made certain her childrenhad the opportunity to live the American Dream she never could.

On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships.

Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly: Blackness and America's Gothic Soul explores American culture's inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black deaths feed a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning.

Jabari Asim goes beyond what's taught in the classroom and tells a fact-filled history of African Americans through politics, activism, sports, entertainment, music, and much more. You'll follow the road to freedom beginning with the slave trade and the middle passage through the abolitionist movement and the Civil War where many African Americans fought as soldiers. You'll learn how slave songs often contained hidden messages and how a 15-year-old Jamaican-born young man named Clive Campbell helped to create hip-hop in the early 1970's.

Did you know that NASA uses mathematics for space travel? Meet Katherine Johnson, one of the first African-American and female mathematicians who worked for NASA. Learn about her life growing up in segregated America and her journey to pursue her education and dreams. Her mathematical calculations helped American astronauts to go to space, land on the moon, and return to earth safely in 1969!

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free illuminates for each of us how the path to healing America’s broken heart starts with each of us having the courage to heal our own.

Augusta Savage was arguably the most influential American artist of the 1930s. A gifted sculptor, Savage was commissioned to create a portrait bust of W.E.B. Du Bois for the New York Public Library. She flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, and became a teacher to an entire generation of African American artists, including Jacob Lawrence, and would go on to be nationally recognized as one of the featured artists at the 1939 World’s Fair. She was the first-ever recorded Black gallerist, and worked to advance equal rights in the arts. And yet popular history has forgotten her name.

One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?

“Kids always search for heroes, so we might as well have a say in it”, Brad Meltzer realized, and so he envisioned this friendly, fun approach to biography - for his own kids, and for yours. Each book tells the story of one of America’s icons in a vivacious, conversational way. Each book focuses on a particular character trait that made that role model heroic. For example, Rosa Parks dared to stand up for herself and other African Americans by staying seated, and as a result she helped end public bus segregation and launch the country’s Civil Rights Movement.

Michael Jackson's journey to fame began in 1966 at age eight, when he started singing with his brothers in the Jackson 5. In the early 1970s, he launched a solo career, accumulating a dozen number-one singles. His record-breaking album, Thriller, has sold an estimated 110 million copies worldwide. He won 17 Grammy awards and was introduced into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. In 2009, people of all ages mourned Michael's sudden death.

From the moment she first sang at church in McComb, Mississippi, Brandy knew her voice was special. At fourteen she landed her first record deal. At fifteen her album went platinum. At sixteen she was starring in the hit sitcom Moesha and became the first Black actress to play Cinderella on-screen alongside fairy godmother Whitney Houston. Now, for the first time, Brandy reveals the real story behind her life in the spotlight, the stratospheric highs and the unimaginable lows, the groundbreaking moments and the relatable journey she had to take to discover her authentic self—as Brandy.

Created by the founder of Breathing Space Creative Literary Studio, acclaimed writer and editor Chelene Knight, Let It Go draws on personal experience and the advice of leaders from various Black communities to share hard-won tools for joy-discovery—tools such as how to say no with love; how to call back activities that feel good; how to reshape communication with those closest to you; how to revise language; and most of all, how to learn to let go in order to redefine what we think joy is.

Dexter Scott King was just seven years old when an assassin took his father Martin Luther King's life. In this memoir he reveals his shattered childhood in the shadow of the King legacy as well as memories of his father and insights into race in the United States.

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. This book illuminates the US's core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement.

The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa. The 26-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents' forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel.