Black History Month

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories.

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant information wanted advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide listeners back to devastating moments of family separation when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children.

A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina, and her final escape and emancipation, Jacobs' narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published in 1861, is one of the most important books ever written documenting the traumas and horrors of slavery in the antebellum South.

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom.

Langston Hughes was among the Harlem Renaissance authors who traveled widely during the 1920s. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, covering the years through 1931, Hughes offers recollections of his childhood in Kansas, his high school years in Cleveland, his sojourn with his father in Mexico, and his initial reactions to New York City and Harlem.

Harriet Tubman's name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children's literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M.

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home.

In the last decade of the 20th century, during a time when African Americans were starting to take inventory of the gains of the civil rights movement and its effects on the lives of black professionals in the public sphere, the memoirs of several journalists were published, a number of which became national bestsellers.

Professor Clarence Taylor sheds some much-needed light on the rich intellectual and political tradition that lies in the black religious community. From the Pentecostalism of Bishop Smallwood Williams and the flamboyant leadership of the Reverend Al Sharpton, to the radical Presbyterianism of Milton Arthur Galamison and the controversial and mass-mobilization by Minister Louis Farrakhan, black religious leaders have figured prominently in the struggle for social equality in America.

The visionary author's masterpiece pulls us--along with her Black female hero--through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.

Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist in Mississippi, the state's field secretary for the NAACP, and a World War II veteran who had served in the United States Army.

The original essays in this comprehensive collection examine the lives and sports of famous and not-so-famous African American male and female athletes from the nineteenth century to today. Here are twenty insightful biographies that furnish perspectives on the changing status of these athletes and how these changes mirrored the transformation of sports, American society, and civil rights legislation.

A "gripping, sensitive" biography of the trailblazing singer who carved a path for African American artists including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson (The Atlanta Voice).   Performing in a country rife with racism and segregation, the tenor Roland Hayes was the first African American man to reach international fame as a concert performer. He became one of the few artists in the world who could sell out Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, and Covent Garden.

David Ruggles (1810-1849) was one of the most heroic--and has been one of the most often overlooked--figures of the early abolitionist movement in America. Graham Russell Gao Hodges provides the first biography of this African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass.

For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit. In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices.

An updated edition of the classic study that took "an enormous step toward filling some of the voids in the literature of slavery" (The Washington Post Book World). One of the most important books published on slave society, Stolen Childhood focuses on the millions of children and youth enslaved in 19th-century America.

Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present.

This work describes the journalism careers of four black women within the context of the period in which they lived and worked. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Amy Jacques Garvey were among a group of approximately twenty black women journalists who wrote for newspapers, magazines and other media during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad. Schechter's comprehensive treatment makes vivid the scope of Wells-Barnett's contributions and examines why the political philosophy and leadership of this extraordinary activist eventually became marginalized.