African American Families

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.

Ever since running away at the age of fourteen, Paul-Edward, the son of a white landowner and a black slave, has had one dream: to own land every bit as good as his daddy's. While growing up, Paul-Edward loved, and feared, his father, but he loved the land unconditionally. Then, after a rash act of youthful rebellion, he leaves his family behind and vows to succeed on his own. However, for anyone black coming of age in 1880's Mississippi, this is no simple goal.

Since childhood, identical twins Leona and Fiona Dunbar have been getting in—and out—of trouble by pretending to be each other. Yet underneath, they couldn’t be more different. Outspoken Leona lives to break rules, have a good time, and scandalize their respectable hometown of Lexington. Fiona is a seemingly demure churchgoing girl who is the apple of her domineering, widowed mother Mavis’s eye. But together, the twins have fooled teachers, boyfriends, bosses, racist police—and most importantly, straitlaced Mavis.

Why exactly Charley Bordelon's late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous. Recognizing this as a chance to start over, Charley and her 11-year-old daughter, Micah, say good-bye to Los Angeles. They arrive just in time for growing season but no amount of planning can prepare Charley for a Louisiana that's mired in the past: as her judgmental but big-hearted grandmother tells her, cane farming is always going to be a white man's business.

Growing up poor in Texas, Vera Lomax used every gold-digging trick in the book to land a rich husband. Now living in the lap of luxury in San Francisco, her only job is to fawn over her much-older husband, so it's been easy for her to balance a life of shopping and affairs with younger men with a major secret: the 16-year bribery of one of her husband's mistresses to keep her pregnancy under wraps. Vera figures that a little hush money every month will ensure her husband's fortune is hers alone....

In Trinidad, in 1796, teenage Rosa Rendon quietly but purposefully rebels against typical female roles and behavior. Bright, competitive, and opinionated, Rosa sees no reason she should learn to cook and keep house - it is obvious her talents lie in running the farm she expects to be her birthright, despite her two older siblings. But as her homeland goes from Spanish to British rule, it becomes increasingly unclear whether its free black property owners - Rosa's family among them - will be allowed to keep their assets, their land, and ultimately, their freedom.

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.

In this compelling urban tale, Karim Spencer becomes a successful businessman - despite being raised by a bootlegger in a bad section of town. His sister is a down-on-her-luck stripper with a gangsta-wannabe son, and his despondent brother is serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit.

As the 20th century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom". Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation on the Jonestown massacre.

Lucas has been in the fight against the evil forces in his town since the beginning, but he is tired of feeling like an outsider. When the start of high school presents Lucas with options beyond D&D and being bullied, he wonders if he can be more than invisible. After connecting with one of the few other Black students at school, Lucas starts to learn more about himself apart from his friend group. And he begins to understand himself as a Black teen in Hawkins, which feels unlike anything—in this world or any other—he’s ever experienced.

James Beard award - winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history.

She's smart, gorgeous, and mysterious. For business executive Nathan Carver, a man with everything, Jessica Bolton is the first woman he can't simply charm, buy, or seduce. And even before Jessica gets a taste of his luxurious lifestyle and irresistible moves, she's determined to eliminate the competition and become this handsome bachelor's one and only. But Jessica's deceptive allure is just the beginning.

In God Don't Play, trouble comes a woman's way just when she thinks she's finally got it all figured out. Annette Goode couldn't be happier with where she is in life. She has a good job, a comfortable home, and a wonderful husband and daughter. But tough times lie ahead. Out of the blue, Annette begins receiving anonymous hate mail and threatening phone calls. It seems her life isn't as settled as she thought, and demons from her past surface in unexpected ways.

Journalist Zoie Crawford had to leave New Orleans to finally make her own life. Her grandmother, Claudia, inspired her to follow her dreams - just as her mother, Rose, held on too tight. But with Claudia's passing, Zoie reluctantly returns home, where the past is written in the lonely corners of the bayou and the New South's supercharged corridors of power. And there she discovers a stunning, painstakingly kept secret - one that could skyrocket her career but destroy another woman's...and change both their vastly different lives for better or for much worse.

Annette Goode has finally found a man who loves her. But at a pre-wedding ceremony, her ugly past is revealed, and her world falls apart. When she reunites with her childhood sweetheart, it seems like everything might be fine - until her long-absent friend, who hides a deadly secret, comes back into Annette's life.

Nationally best-selling author Vanessa Davis Griggs helps spread the Word with powerful fiction for the faithful. In The Other Side of Dare, Paris Simmons-Holyfield finds her marriage of seven years stressed to the breaking point when she works toward adopting nine-year-old Jasmine. Her husband Andrew and her father oppose the adoption. And while Paris has her suspicions as to why, it soon becomes clear that Jasmine is the key to a long-buried secret. Now Paris must overcome tests to her faith and marriage as she searches for the truth.

It’s 2008, and the inauguration of President Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated Black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He’s eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to—and was forced to leave behind—when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she’d never look back, but Ruth knows that she must make peace with the past. Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair.

Seth Garrett's family taught him that anything less than the best simply isn't an option. Now he's out to prove he can be the most successful Garrett - and Rachel McNeal fits the bill. She's pretty, hard-working, good in bed - and willing to finance his dreams. He thinks she's perfect wife material - until he meets her relatives and discovers they're far from perfect. No problem, Seth's got a replacement lined up to give him the good life he's entitled to...

In 2010 former gang leader turned community activist Big Mike Cummings asked UCLA gang expert Jorja Leap to co-lead a group of men struggling to be better fathers in Watts, South Los Angeles. These men, black and brown, from late adolescence to middle age, come together each week to help one another answer the question "how can I be a good father when I've never had one?"