African Time

It's a few weeks before her 40th birthday, and Sienna finally has the life she's dreamed of: a husband who loves her, a private practice that's flourishing, and an extended family that has finally put its skeletons to rest. However, when a homeless woman named Sweet Violet comes under Sienna's care, with nothing on her but broken memories and a pocket watch stopped at 5:11, Sienna knows the peaceful life she's been enjoying will come to a screeching halt.

Black, a small-time thug with big dreams, discovers the demand for crack cocaine in the Virginia housing projects where he lives and sees the drug as a meal ticket for his family. His younger cousin, Lo, who idolizes Black, joins him in his business endeavors. But as they work side by side with hustlers and killers, the pair is soon thrown into situations beyond their control, and the bonds of their family are thoroughly tested.

In 1859, at the largest recorded slave auction in American history, more than 400 men, women, and children were sold by the Butler Plantation estates. This book is one of the first to analyze the operation of this auction and trace the lives of slaves before, during, and after their sale. Immersing herself in the personal papers of the Butlers, accounts from journalists that witnessed the auction, genealogical records, and oral histories, Anne C. Bailey weaves together a narrative that brings the auction to life.

That clock can’t be right. When Elise wakes up the morning after her birthday celebration, she’s surprised to find herself in her bedroom. Last she can remember, she had fallen asleep next to her best friends at her slumber party in her basement, and it was October. But now she’s alone, and her phone says it’s April 8. Elise doesn’t understand. How could she have woken up six months later?

Ona Judge wanted more than the best job an enslaved person could have, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman challenged why some people are masters and others enslaved, Ida B. Wells exposed post-slavery brutality, Martin Luther King Jr. was the key voice to overturn Jim Crow, and Barack Obama changed modern-day racial attitudes. For author Ray Anthony Shepard A Long Time Coming is highly personal, a chronicle of the times of his grandparents, parents, and himself.

Mark Binelli turns his sharp, forceful prose to fiction in an inventive retelling of the outrageous life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, a bluesman with one hit and a string of inflammatory guises. He came onstage in a coffin, carried by pallbearers, drunk enough to climb into his casket every night. Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull.

Step into the riveting saga of the Scramble for Africa and learn about the dramatic reshaping of the African continent. This audiobook offers a lens into the pivotal moments that saw Africa carved and claimed by European powers. Explore the technological revolution that was occurring in the backdrop, as well as the indomitable spirit of the Africans who resisted colonial rule.

In this audiobook, you will learn about Ancient Egypt’s incredible inventions, pharaohs, and architecture, how the Egyptians weren’t the only African nation to build pyramids, and the introduction of Christianity and Islam and how they impacted tribal religions.

Things are falling apart in the Richardson household. Angry arguments between Celine and her husband, Keith, have become routine. She resents that he's working long hours and staying out all night, and he accuses her of not giving him the attention he deserves. Their marriage is at a crossroads, and Celine worries how her 10-year-old daughter, Kassie, will be affected. But the situation turns devastating when Celine is diagnosed with breast cancer.

White Americans have long been comfortable in the assumption that they are the cultural norm. Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation’s diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a Black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.

With a rich geography and fascinating history, this continent is truly awe inspiring! It’s no wonder Africa has given rise to many of our languages, philosophies, and legends which we honor to this day. Using reliable, fact-checked written resources and discoveries from world-renowned archeologists, History Brought Alive presents African History.

Your History: From the Beginning of Time to the Present by J.A. Rogers is a compelling and enlightening book that explores the significant contributions of African and African-descended individuals throughout human history. Written in a concise, accessible style, the book highlights achievements in science, culture, politics, and innovation from ancient civilizations to modern times.

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous Black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. In this first full-scale biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927–2003).

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

A bullied teenager and his friends must save their neighborhood from mysterious government agents. All while trying to find out what happened to Ja'bre's father, who has been missing for over a year in a secret military program. Set in the late '80s. Ja'bre and his friends, go on a cosmic adventure. Right in their own neighborhood.

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life.

One of the worst acts of racial violence in American history took place in 1921, when a White mob numbering in the thousands decimated the thriving Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Burning recreates Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explores the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its Black residents and Tulsa's White population, narrates events leading up to and including Greenwood's devastation, and documents the subsequent silence that surrounded this tragedy.

When civil rights leader Hosea Lorenzo Williams died in 2000, US Congressman John Lewis said of him, "Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America. Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us."

Robert Benjamin Lewis (1802 - 1858) was an African American and Native American author, inventor, and entrepreneur. In the ethnological work Light and Truth, Lewis claims that Adam and Eve were people of color, as were the Egyptians and many great figures of the ancient world, including Julius Caesar and Plato. Denouncing notions of white superiority, he asserts that all humans have a common origin, and pointed to a shared cultural history between Africans and Native Americans.

William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), although still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized Black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post-Reconstruction America. For more than 30 years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation.