• Topic Guide
  • Staff-Created List

JoCoLibrary - Race Reads - Historical Biography

Race Project KC's recommendations for books exploring race issues in the United States.

Johnson County Library

37 items

  • The Three Mothers

    How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

    Tubbs, Anna Malaika,
    In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King,…
    BookNew York, NY : Flatiron Books, [2021] — 306.8743 Tubbs 02/2021
  • The Ties That Bind

    a Memoir of Race, Memory, and Redemption

    Berry, Bertice
    When novelist Bertice Berry set out to write a history of her family, she initially believed she'd uncover a story of slavery and black pain, but the deeper she dug, the more surprises she found. There was heartache, yes, but also…
    BookNew York : Broadway Books, c2009. — 973.7115 Berry 03/2009
  • Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony--only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths,…
    BookDetroit : Wayne State University Press, [2019] — BIO BUCHANAN S. Buchanan 09/2019
  • All Blood Runs Red

    the Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard-- Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy

    Keith, Phil, 1946-
    The incredible life story of Eugene Bullard, the first African American military pilot in WWI, who went on to become a self-taught jazz musician, a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights…
    BookToronto : Hanover Square Press, [2019] — BIO BULLARD E. Keith 10/2019
  • Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796-1833), the enslaved mixed-race wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of…
    BookChapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2023] — BIO CHINN J. Myers 10/2023
  • A Shot in the Moonlight

    How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South

    Montgomery, Ben,
    A true tale of justice in the Jim Crow south relates the story of George Dinning, a freed slave who was wrongfully convicted of murder after defending himself against a white mob and later won damages against them in court with the help of…
    BookNew York : Little, Brown Spark, 2021. — 976.904 Montgome 01/2021
  • A Glorious Liberty

    Frederick Douglass and the Fight for An Antislavery Constitution

    Root, Damon,
    A review of Douglass's ideas about free labor and constitutional liberty in order to understand the origins and meanings of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, each of which grew out of the anti-slavery movement that…
    Book[Lincoln, Nebraska] : Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press [2020] — 973.8092 Root 01/2021
  • An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the…
    Book[New York] Penguin Books, 2021. — 973.8/092 23
  • The Best of Enemies

    Race and Redemption in the New South

    Davidson, Osha Gray,
    C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil…
    BookChapel Hill, NC : The University of North Carolina Press, [2018] — 305.8009 Davidson 01/2019
  • Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson is about the love one Black woman had for her race, of men and women, and, finally, of herself. Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was a former slave and a father of…
    BookNew York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. — BIO DUNBARNE A. Green 02/2022
  • The story of America's first Black engineer, his revolutionary son, and the corporation that destroyed their relationship.
    BookNew York, NY : Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2019] — BIO FORD J. Ford 09/2019
  • Fannie Lou Hamer

    America's Freedom Fighting Woman

    Brooks, Maegan Parker,
    This book underscores that Hamer's historical 1964 DNC speech was but one moment within a remarkable life that spanned fifty-nine tumultuous years in the history of American race relations. For the first forty-four years of her life, Hamer…
    BookLanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2020] — BIO HAMER F. Brooks 06/2020
  • Walk With Me

    a Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer

    Larson, Kate Clifford,
    Few figures embody the physical courage, unstinting sacrifice, and inspired heroism behind the Civil Rights movement more than Fannie Lou Hamer. For millions hers was the voice that made "This Little Light of Mine" an anthem. Her…
    BookOxford : Oxford University Press, 2021. — BIO HAMER F. Larson 09/2021
  • Looking for Lorraine

    a Life of Lorraine Hansberry

    Perry, Imani, 1972-
    Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun , her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching…
    BookBoston : Beacon Press, 2018. — BIO HANSBERR L. Perry 09/2018
  • Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain

    the Extraordinary Story of Love, Civil Rights, and Labor Activism

    Hill, Norman, 1933-
    When Velma Murphy was knocked unconscious by a brick thrown by a man from an angry white mob and was carried away by Norman Hill, it was the beginning of a six-decade-long love story and the turmoil, excitement, and struggle for civil…
    BookNew York : Regalo Press, [2023] — 323.1196 Hill 11/2023
  • With Her Fist Raised

    Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism

    Lovett, Laura L.
    The first biography of Dorothy Pitman Hughes, co-founder of Ms. Magazine and trailblazing Black feminist activist whose work made children, race, and welfare rights central to the women's movement.
    BookBoston : Beacon Press, [2021] — BIO HUGHES D. Lovett 01/2021
  • Into the Bright Sunshine

    Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

    Freedman, Samuel G.,
    Hubert Humphrey's public life began and ended in disgrace. Humphrey started out as an outlier in the post-war Democratic Party and ended the same--as the man who lost his bearings during the Vietnam War and then lost the presidency to…
    BookNew York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] — BIO HUMPHREY H. Freedman 01/2024
  • At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite…
    BookNew York : Pantheon Books, [2015] — 305.896 Jefferso 09/2015
  • The Broken Road

    George Wallace and a Daughter's Journey to Reconciliation

    Kennedy, Peggy Wallace,
    From the daughter of one of America's most virulent segregationists, a memoir that reckons with her father George Wallace's legacy of hate -- and illuminates her journey towards redemption. Peggy Wallace Kennedy has been widely hailed as…
    BookNew York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. — BIO KENNEDY P. Kennedy 11/2019
  • Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown…
    BookNew York : Crown Publishers, c2010. — BIO LACKS H. Skloot