JoCoLibrary - Race Reads - Historical BiographyLike this list

37 items

• The Three Mothers

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

  Tubbs, Anna Malaika,

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  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,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Ties That Bind

  a Memoir of Race, Memory, and Redemption

  Berry, Bertice

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Black Indian

  Buchanan, Shonda,

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  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,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• All Blood Runs Red

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

  Keith, Phil, 1946-

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Vice President's Black Wife

  the Untold Life of Julia Chinn

  Myers, Amrita Chakrabarti,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Shot in the Moonlight

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

  Montgomery, Ben,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Glorious Liberty

  Frederick Douglass and the Fight for An Antislavery Constitution

  Root, Damon,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

  Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Best of Enemies

  Race and Redemption in the New South

  Davidson, Osha Gray,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

  Green, Tara T.

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Think Black

  a Memoir

  Ford, Clyde W.

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  The story of America's first Black engineer, his revolutionary son, and the corporation that destroyed their relationship.

• Fannie Lou Hamer

  America's Freedom Fighting Woman

  Brooks, Maegan Parker,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Walk With Me

  a Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer

  Larson, Kate Clifford,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Looking for Lorraine

  a Life of Lorraine Hansberry

  Perry, Imani, 1972-

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain

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

  Hill, Norman, 1933-

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• With Her Fist Raised

  Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism

  Lovett, Laura L.

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  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.

• Into the Bright Sunshine

  Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

  Freedman, Samuel G.,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Negroland

  a Memoir

  Jefferson, Margo, 1947-

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Broken Road

  George Wallace and a Daughter's Journey to Reconciliation

  Kennedy, Peggy Wallace,

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

  Skloot, Rebecca, 1972-

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  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…Read moreRead more of this annotation