African American Historical Fiction

Josephine "Jojo" Best has it all figured out. Just 17, she's been to college, she has her own hairdressing shop, and nothing will distract her from her goals. That is, until handsome George Brooks begins to pursue her. Then the return of her childhood nemesis complicates her life even further. No girl is immune to Adam Morgan's charm. But when a wound brings him home from the War Between the States, it's a girl he used to call "Pest" who's turning the tables. All grown up, Jojo is being courted by another soldier, and Adam knows it would be foolish to play with her heart.

Chima is an outcast among outcasts. He's on the verge of giving up on life entirely when he encounters the sacred Biafran lion. Gifted with an incredible power and introduced to a world beyond belief, Chima thinks his life may finally be turning around. When a rival nation kidnaps Chima's father, his world is shattered. To save his family and the Biafran people, he must learn to believe in himself and his newfound power. As he fights back against a secret weapon, he wonders if his efforts to protect his adopted home could doom them all.

Leo Love, and his only son, Michael, navigate their way through the cultural limitations and divisions that afflict American life. Starting from the 1950s and into the new millennium, their lives at times, cross with the lives of some of history's greatest icons. Joining their intellects and talent together, they become beacons for the doomsday clock. As champions for human rights, they wage war on ignorance through love and wisdom.

This book contextualizes the history of the Mormon migration with other events in American and particularly African American history. Few are aware that several black Mormon converts played important parts in the beginnings of Civil Rights issues from 1930 onward. Any listeners who want to broaden their understanding of African American history in the days from the American Revolution until just before the Civil War will find this book unique and full of information unavailable elsewhere.

Two decades before the Civil War, a middle-class farmer named Samuel Maddox lies on his deathbed. Elsewhere in his Virginia home, a young woman named Kitty knows her life is about to change. She is one of the Maddox family's slaves - and Samuel's biological daughter. When Samuel's wife Mary inherits her husband's property, she will own Kitty, too, along with Kitty's three small children. After Samuel's death, Mary decides to grant Kitty and her children their freedom and travels with them to Pennsylvania, where she will file papers declaring Kitty's emancipation.

In 1899, 10-year-old Olivia Truluck’s home in Missouri is torched by the Ku Klux Klan. Olivia and her family leave the Show-me state to settle in the Greenwood District, north of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Starting with the 1905 Tulsa oil boom, both Blacks and Whites prosper, but tragedy comes with World War I, followed by the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave begin their lives as childhood friends, but that friendship is not bound to last. Belton (modeled on Booker T. Washington) is an African American integrationist; Bernard (modeled on W. E. B. Du Bois) is a biracial militant, and their lives, like their politics, quickly diverge. When they do meet again, at a Black nationalist community called “the Imperium,” the stakes could not be higher.

A young girl’s life is shattered when she is stolen from her African village in a midnight raid, ruthlessly torn from her family to be beaten, chained, degraded, and enslaved in a heartless world she can barely comprehend. The slave ledger at Virginia’s Belle Grove Plantation only reveals that Judah was purchased to be the cook, gave birth to 12 children, and died in April 1836. Brian C. Johnson’s important work of historical fiction goes beyond what is recorded to portray the depth, humanity, and vulnerability of a beautiful soul all but erased by history.

Desde pequeño, Elwood Curtis ha escuchado con devoción, en el viejo tocadiscos de su abuela, los discursos de Martin Luther King. Sus ideas, al igual que las de James Baldwin, han hecho de este adolescente negro un estudiante prometedor que sueña con un futuro digno. Pero de poco sirve esto en la Academia Nickel para chicos: un reformatorio que se vanagloria de convertir a sus internos en hombres hechos y derechos pero que oculta una realidad inhumana respaldada por muchos y obviada por todos.

It’s 1776 in the American colonies, and revolution is in the air. Richard Pierpoint, torn from his home in Africa as a young boy and sent across the sea as a slave, hears the word “freedom” repeatedly, and yearns for a better life. When the British offer freedom to any slave who joins the British Army, Richard, and the beautiful and mysterious Shenandoah who has stolen his heart, escape from their masters and begin a quest in the pristine forests of the Mohawk Valley to join the British guerilla unit, Butler’s Rangers.

Despite being a straight-A student and voracious reader, eight-year old Sandrine Miller is treated as little more than a servant by her mother, who forces Sandrine to clean house, do chores and take care of her younger half-sister, Yolanda. On top of the despair of her life at home, Sandrine must confront growing up against the harshness of life in 1970s-era New Orleans, where men in cars follow her home from school and she is ostracized because she is a light-skinned black girl.

Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden's rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

Brilliantly portrayed by a novelist with "a talent for hyperbole and downright yarning unequaled since Mark Twain", (Saturday Review), this slave's-eye view of the Civil War exposes America's racial foibles of the past and present with uninhibited humor and panache. Mixing history, fantasy, political reality, and comedy, Ishmael Reed spins the tale of three runaway slaves and the master determined to catch them.

Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter is rooted not only in the horrific reality of institutional slavery but also in the historical fact of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings (here represented by the character Currer). In William Wells Brown’s telling, Currer has two daughters by Jefferson, Clotel and Althesa. Both become Jefferson’s legal property when they are born, and both wind up at auction - along with their mother - when Jefferson dies.

April 7, 1994 to July 15, 1994 proved to be a veritable nightmare for 100 harrowing days in Rwanda, so this book precedes the anniversary of a momentous time. Deep-seated enmity between Tutsis and Hutus boiled over, starting from the downing of President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane, and culminating in a vicious slaughter of Tutsis, their sympathizers, and in turn, Hutu perpetrators at the hands of vindictive Tutsis.

Johnny Holt Jr. comes home to Kentucky for the summer to find his father, JJ, has made alliances with a notorious slave owner, Spanish-born Edmond Maguerro, to turn Holt Lands into a million-dollar plantation. Johnny is indifferent. Much as he hates the idea because of his liberal views about slavery, he doesn’t involve himself until he meets Elisa, one of his father’s new slaves.

Author Lawrence Reid Bechtel has captured the story of Isaac Granger, a slave from Thomas Jefferson's plantation as told through the eyes of amateur historian Reverend Charles Campbell. In 1852, after much searching through the Black districts of Petersburg, Virginia, the amateur historian Charles Campbell finally located Isaac Granger, a former slave of the late Thomas Jefferson.

Amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear amongst its most dangerous denizens. But the ghosts from her past are always by her side - and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she loves most. Can one woman ever sacrifice enough to save an entire community? Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel - a magical love story, a compelling chronicle of interracial tension, and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

It is 1910, and Philadelphia is burning. The last place Spring wants to be is in the run-down, colored section of a hospital surrounded by the groans of sick people and the ghost of her dead sister. But as her son Edward lays dying, she has no other choice. There are whispers that Edward drove a streetcar into a shop window. Some people think it was an accident, others claim that it was his fault, the police are certain that he was part of a darker agenda. Is he guilty? Can they find the truth? All Spring knows is that time is running out.

The Roux in the Gumbo is an emotional and inspirational drama, telling the story of a Louisiana family spanning the generations from the era of slavery to the present day. You will hear of the romances, challenges, and adventures they experience as their lives are intertwined by one common goal - basic survival during the Reconstruction era in Louisiana.