African American Biography

The inside story of how a courageous FBI informant helped to bring down the KKK organization responsible for a brutal civil rights-era killing, When Evil Lived in Laurel plumbs the nature and harrowing consequences of institutional racism, and brings fresh light to this chapter in the history of civil rights in the South - one with urgent implications for today.

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.

How does a white kid from the New York suburbs, harmonica in hand, end up earning himself a busker's spot on the Harlem sidewalks next to Mr. Satan, a Mississippi-born legend? How did an interracial blues duo fare on the streets of New York during a turbulent, fractious time marked by racially-motivated murders in Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and Crown Heights?

Uplifting and occasionally heartbreaking stories of love from the time of slavery in the American south.

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers.

In his meteoric, 13-year rise to fame, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a mass movement for civil rights - with his relentless peaceful, non-violent protests, public demonstrations, and eloquent speeches. But as violent threats cast a dark shadow over Dr. King's life, Swanson hones in on James Earl Ray, a bizarre, racist prison escapee who tragically ends King's life.

Renowned American astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi (born James Plummer) pens a gripping, gritty coming-of-age memoir, from young boy to graduate-school student, that will resonate with teenagers, especially those of color, who are facing many choices and obstacles as they navigate their young adult lives.

Two of America’s most memorable African American freedom fighters are discussed in this biography book. Listen to the stories of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Discover their contributions as abolitionists and African American leaders. Wake up to the socio-economic truths of their times. Grab a copy, listen, and be inspired today.

In The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice.

August Wilson grew up open to the creative inspiration in everything he encountered: in library books, in music, in artworks, in the lively conversations overheard in the restaurants and barbershops lining the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood. August paid attention. He listened. And when he got older, he got ideas about what to do with everything he’d seen and heard — ideas that would make him one of the greatest playwrights in American history.

In the midst of her groundbreaking twenty-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once declared, “Everyone—with the exception of the black woman herself—has been interpreting the black woman.” Edited and introduced by Zinga A. Fraser, Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words gives listeners a rare opportunity to engage with the congresswoman’s powerful ideas in her own voice.

Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller is one of the design field's most respected figures. She is legendary for her decades of scholarship and activism and is known as a touchstone and conscience for the design profession. This long-awaited book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades: “Where are the Black designers?” along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: Where did they originate? Where have they been? Why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons?

Once upon a time, children's music was just Mother Goose, nursery songs, and lullabies. And then came Ella Jenkins. Ella Jenkins is an American folk singer and living legend dubbed “The First Lady of Children’s Music.” For nearly 70 years, she has been writing and performing music that has entertained and engaged generations of young listeners. In Make a Pretty Song, Ella’s life and legacy are captured.

To understand the contemporary racial wealth gap, we must first unpack the historic attacks on Indigenous and Black land ownership. From the moment that colonizers set foot on Virginian soil, a centuries-long war was waged, resulting in an existential dilemma: Who owns what on stolen land? Who owns what with stolen labor? To answer these questions, we must confront one of this nation’s first sins: stealing, hoarding, and commodifying the land.

Bigger Thomas, the central figure in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), eludes easy categorization. A violent and troubled character who rejects the rules of society, Bigger is both victim and perpetrator, damaged by racism and segregation on the South Side of Chicago, seemingly raping and killing without regrets. His story has electrified readers for more than eight decades, and it continues to galvanize debates around representation, respectability, social justice, and racism in American life.

Listen to the sound of survival, courage, and democracy—the soundtrack of America. Hear Billie Holiday's raspy, mournful voice, and tap your foot to Louis Armstrong's trumpet. Scream with James Brown and bop your head to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Can you spot the 80+ references to artists like Robert Johnson, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, Whitney Houston, Lauryn Hill, and Beyonce?

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother—and the empowering decision to leave her first marriage. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the US housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage.

Yvonne Clark had an engineering spark—an instinct for figuring out how things worked. Broken lamp? She screwed, rewired, and wrenched until…light! Wrecked radio? She twisted, snipped, and hammered until…music! Clogged furnace? She picked, plucked, and cleared until…heat! When she grew up, Yvonne’s problem-solving power took her to NASA, where fellow engineers had a serious problem with the Saturn V rocket’s F-1 engine: It had hot spots—high temperatures in the engine. Can Yvonne Clark and her engineering spark solve the problem?

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Civil Rights icon John Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations.

John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists.