African American Memoris

Stephen L. Carter delves into his past and retrieves the inspiring story of his grandmother’s life. She was Black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s - and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected 20 lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.

The purpose of this audiobook is an awkward discussion of Eric Heard’s life to his son. He talks about his life in a candid way that tries to explain his anxiety as an African American dad. It is an open and honest account of his life through the life of a child that has been through a lot in his life. It is a reflection on his life that has been shaped by his childhood experiences.

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in 1845; it is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by the famous author and former slave Frederick Douglass. The book includes two introductions by well-known abolitionists: a preface by William Lloyd Garrison, and a letter by Wendell Phillips, both confirming the veracity of the account and the literacy of its author. It is generally considered to be the most famous of a number of abolition narratives written by former slaves in the same era.

The forgotten story of a criminal trial that brought national attention to a young defendant named Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as told by Fred D. Gray, Dr. King’s lawyer and friend, along with New York Times bestselling authors Dan Abrams and David Fisher. The audiobook concludes with an exclusive conversation between Fred Gray and Dan Abrams.

This cultural biography tells the enthralling story of the high-achieving Black elites who thrived in the nation's capital during Reconstruction. Daniel Murray (1851-1925), an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, was a prominent member of this glorious class. Murray's life was reflective of those who were well-off at the time. This social circle included African American educators, ministers, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, US senators and representatives, and other government officials.

Nadine Cohodas's biography of the passionate, talented and difficult, but ultimately lovable, Nina Simone is an object lesson in American life. With thorough interviews and research, much new material and information that has never before come to light, Nadine tells the story of Eunice Wayman, born in Tryon NC in 1933, with a stunning musical talent that was spotted early by family and friends.

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow.

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.

When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at 35, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the 20th-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt’s lynching at the hands of vengeful White men in his Southern town.

A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres....

For players, fans, managers, and executives, Jackie Robinson remains baseball’s singular figure, the person who most profoundly extended, and continues to extend, the reach of the game. Beyond Ruth. Beyond Clemente. Beyond Aaron. Beyond the heroes of today. Now, a half-century since Robinson’s death, letters come to his widow, Rachel, by the score. But Robinson’s impact extended far beyond baseball: he opened the door for Black Americans to participate in other sports, and was a national figure who spoke and wrote eloquently about inequality.

Beginning with his final departure from Neverland, Untouchable takes listeners through Jackson's final four years, as he shuttled from California to the Middle East, Ireland, Asia, the East Coast, and Las Vegas, planning to recapture his wealth and reputation with a comeback album and a series of 50 mega-concerts, for which he was rehearsing until the day before his death. Sullivan has never-before-reported information about Jackson's business dealings and the pedophilia allegations that irreparably marked his reputation, and he had exclusive access to inner-circle figures.

Meet. Love. Break. Recover. That’s been the routine of Staceyann Chin’s romantic life. But at 35, after yet another devasting breakup and overcome by an urgent and all-consuming desire to have a child, Chin realizes she’s running out of time. So she sets her sights on a single target: motherhood.

LeBron James is the hero in two very American tales: one, a success story the nation loves; the other, the latest installment in an ongoing chronicle of American antiblackness. James has lived in the public eye ever since high school when his extraordinary athletic skills subjected his every action, every statement, every fashion choice to intense public scrutiny that tells us less about James himself and more about a nation still wrestling with many social inequities.

A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" to provide a prosperous life for her family - and how those sacrifices resonate over time. This original, timely, and deeply relatable portrait of one American family is essential listening.

From acclaimed actor and producer Wendell Pierce, an insightful and poignant portrait of family, New Orleans and the transforming power of art. On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina barreled into New Orleans, devastating many of the city's neighborhoods, including Pontchartrain Park, the home of Wendell Pierce's family and the first African American middle-class subdivision in New Orleans. The hurricane breached many of the city's levees, and the resulting flooding submerged Pontchartrain Park under as much as 20 feet of water.

Nate Shaw's father was born into slavery. Nate was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton and plowing behind a mule. At the age of 47, he faced down a crowd of White deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's livestock. His defiance cost him 12 years in prison.This triumphant autobiography, All God's Dangers, assembled from the 84-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plainspoken story of an "over average" man who witnessed momentous changes in the lives of Southern people, Black and White....

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was Douglass' third autobiography. In it he was able to go into greater detail about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery, as he and his family were no longer in any danger from the reception of his work. In this engrossing narrative he recounts early years of abuse; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns, and his crusade for full civil rights for former slaves.