African American Memoirs

No Justice is the harrowing story of Robbie Tolan, who early on one New Year's Eve morning, found himself being rushed to the hospital. A White police officer had shot him in the chest after mistakenly accusing him of stealing his own car...while in his own driveway.

From the editor of the best-selling anthology The Meaning of Michelle, a celebration of one of the greatest stars of our time, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.

The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles - a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story.

Farah Jasmine Griffin’s beloved father died when she was nine, bequeathing her an unparalleled inheritance in closets full of remarkable books and other records of Black genius. In Read Until You Understand - a line from a note he wrote to her - she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that framed the US Constitution and that inspired Malcolm X’s fervent speeches, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the artistry of Romare Bearden, and many others.

A grandmother's theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It's time to get to know that God.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a cautious 19-year-old rookie preacher when he left Atlanta, Georgia, to attend seminary up north. Immediately at Crozer Theological Seminary, King, or "ML" back then, found that he was surrounded by a white staff and white professors. Even his dorm room had once been used by wounded Confederate soldiers. His fellow seminarians were almost all older; soldiers who'd fought in World War II, pacifists who'd chosen to resist fighting.

In this powerful and passionate memoir - his final work - Cone describes the obstacles he overcame to find his voice, to respond to the signs of the times, and to offer a voice for those - like the parents who raised him in Bearden, Arkansas, in the era of lynching and Jim Crow - who had no voice. Recounting lessons learned both from critics and students, and the ongoing challenge of his models King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, he describes his efforts to use theology as a tool in the struggle against oppression and for a better world.

New York Times best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations - denunciations by the press, rejection from the president, dismissal by the country's Black middle class and militants, assaults on his character, ideology, and political tactics, to name a few - all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty, and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds - part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old African American, Emmett Till, was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped from his bed in the middle of the night by two White men and brutally murdered. His crime: allegedly whistling at a White woman in a convenience store. The killers were eventually acquitted.

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.

In The Warrior Code, entrepreneur, philanthropist, reality star, and retired gunnery sergeant Tee Marie Hanible serves up 11 principles to awaken your inner badass and thrive in the face of adversity. With insightful honesty and wisdom and set against the backdrop of Tee’s life, The Warrior Code will help you understand that things can beat us back from realizing our true potential...but the key is finding the way to realize one’s own innate strength.

For the past three decades, Colin Powell has been among America's most trusted and admired leaders. This biography demonstrates that Powell's decades-long development as an exemplary subordinate is crucial to understanding his astonishing rise from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to the highest echelons of military and political power.

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one humid Mississippi night in 1966. Carmichael’s life changed that day, and so did America’s struggle for civil rights. "Black Power" became the slogan of an era, provoking a national reckoning on race and democracy. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael.

After following her mother to the US at a young age to pursue economic opportunities, one woman must come to terms with the ways in which systematic racism and resultant trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people. In the early '90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream. At first, life in the US was idyllic.

Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, Clarence King was named by John Hay "the best and brightest of his generation". But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for 13 years he lived a double life - as the celebrated White explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a Black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old Black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and Black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is filled with personal stories that bring to life heroic figures we all know and introduce listeners to some of those who’ve worked behind the scenes but are still hidden. Whatever their perch, the Colored Girls, which is what Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore call themselves - are always focused on the larger goal of “hurrying history” so that every American - regardless of race, gender or religious background - can have a seat at the table. This audiobook tells their story.

"You know what our party thinks? 'We're good people with good ideas. That's enough, isn't it?' Being tough enough, mean enough, and vicious enough is just not what they want." Well, tough, mean, and vicious isn't just for Karl Rove anymore. In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party decisively ended 12 years of electoral humiliation by seizing back Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin' is the story of that historic victory, and the one man at the center on whom everything hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel.

Booker T. Washington’s 1901 autobiography can be read as a redemption story echoing many similar voices of its time. Starting from the humiliation he experienced as a slave, he ponders the meaning of identity in a situation that seeks to dehumanize. He furthers his story by expanding on his difficulties in obtaining an education and the need for change in our minds as well as societal structures.