After enduring more than 30 years of slavery, Henry Box Brown achieved freedom by having himself nailed inside a packing crate and shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia. Initially published in 1851, Brown's extraordinary memoir recounts the harsh circumstances of his bondage as well as the details of his 350-mile journey by railroad, steamboat, and horse cart inside a container three feet long and two feet wide.Acclaimed by Dr. Cornel West as one of the great creative acts in the struggle for black freedom, the story of Brown's daring escape continues to resonate as a reflection of the ongoing... View More...
Christmas hits the top of the list for the most joyous time of the year But are you really experiencing the full joy of the season? This book will take you behind the story of the Savior's birth to help you see and know Christ in a way that leads to greater wonder and appreciation. It will show you what the Bible says about the One who came into the world--before He came into the world. You'll gain a full understanding of God's story of redemption as you examine Jesus's character as God, relationship with the Father, appearances in the Old Testament, and more.
In the summer of 1845, Frederick Douglass, the young runaway slave catapulted to fame by his incendiary autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, arrived in Liverpool for the start of a near-two-year tour of Britain and Ireland he always called one of the most transformative periods of his life. Laurence Fenton draws on a wide array of sources from both sides of the Atlantic and combines a unique insight into the early years of one of the great figures of the nineteenth-century world with rich profiles of the enormous personalities at the heart of the trans... View More...
Frederick Douglass's dramatic autobiographical account of his early life as a slave in America. Born into a life of bondage, Frederick Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write. It was a crime punishable by death, but it resulted in one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. His gripping narrative takes us into the fields, cabins, and manors of pre-Civil War plantations in the South and reveals the daily terrors he suffered. Written more than a century and a half ago by a Black man who went on to become a famous orator, U.S. minister to Haiti, and leader of his pe... View More...
Frederick Douglass's dramatic autobiographical account of his early life as a slave in America. Born into a life of bondage, Frederick Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write. It was a crime punishable by death, but it resulted in one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. His gripping narrative takes us into the fields, cabins, and manors of pre-Civil War plantations in the South and reveals the daily terrors he suffered. Written more than a century and a half ago by a Black man who went on to become a famous orator, U.S. minister to Haiti, and leader of his pe... View More...
The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to liberty and reunion with her children in the North.Written and published in 1861 after Jacobs' harrowing escape from a vile and predatory master, the memoir delivers a powerful and unflinching portraya... View More...
The fascinating story of a friendship, a lost tradition, and an incredible discovery, revealing how enslaved men and women made encoded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. In Hidden in Plain View, historian Jacqueline Tobin and scholar Raymond Dobard offer the first proof that certain quilt patterns, including a prominent one called the Charleston Code, were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad. In 1993, historian Jacqueline Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts in th... View More...
In August of 1839, what appeared to be a listless "pirate ship", unidentified by any flag, was spotted off the North Atlantic coast of the United States. On board were thirty barely clad black men, all of whom wore cutlasses, and two white men -- Spanish slave owners with an incredible story to tell. A month earlier, the Amistad, as the ship was known, had set sail from Havana with a valuable cargo of slaves and $40,000 worth of gold doubloons -- and in a matter of days the captain and the cook were dead, and the ship was in the control of the slaves.Thus began "the Amistad affair", which, rep... View More...
Completely revised and edited with an introduction and notes by Vincent Carretta An exciting and often terrifying adventure story, as well as an important precursor to such famous nineteenth-century slave narratives as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative recounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he was able to purchase his freedom in 1766, and his life afterward as a leading and respected figure in the antislavery movement in England. ... View More...
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was not trying to start a movement. She was simply tired of the social injustice. Yet, her simple act of courage started a chain of events that forever shaped the landscape of American race relations.Now, decades after her quiet defiance inspired the modern civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks's own words tell of her courageous life, her passion for freedom and equality, and her strong faith. Reflections by Rosa Parks celebrates the principles and convictions that guided her through a remarkable ... View More...
Former enslaved person Mary Prince's powerful rallying cry for emancipation and extraordinary testament to survival The History of Mary Prince (1831) was the first narrative of a black woman to be published in Britain. It describes Prince's sufferings as a slave in Bermuda, Turks Island and Antigua, and her eventual arrival in London with her brutal owner Mr Wood in 1828. Prince escaped from him and sought assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society, where she dictated her remarkable story to Susanna Strickland (later Moodie). A moving and graphic document, The History drew attention to the conti... View More...
Description: Albert Raboteau was born into a Catholic family in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, three months after his father was shot and killed by a white man. It was during the 1940s, when blacks couldn't swim at the same beach as whites, when the priest gave communion to white Catholics first and made others wait. In a moving account of his life, Raboteau tells how the boy grew into a man, married, became a success as a college administrator, then learned sorrow, lost his way and had to start over again. His is an American spiritual journey that is redolent of sacramental Christianity marking ... View More...
The #1 New York Times bestsellerThe phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space. Now a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers... View More...
Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, Hidden Figures is the never-before-told story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program--and whose contributions have been unheralded, until now.Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts b... View More...
This gripping, fast-paced book tells the dramatic story of the epic 1839 voyage of the schooner Amistad and her cargo of Africans bound for slavery in the New World. Under the leadership of Cinque, a young African farmer, the Africans revolt and seize the ship. They start for home, but instead of reaching Africa, they wind up in New England. The story of these events and the resulting trial of the captured Africans was front-page news at the time. Were they rebellious slaves and mutineers -- property that must rightfully be returned to its owners -- or honest men and women trying to regain the... View More...
Meet the black inventors who lived their dreams--from the early years to modern times Benjamin Banneker Andrew Jackson Beard George E. Carruthers, Ph.D. George Washington Carver Michael Croslin, Ph.D. David Nelson Crosthwait Jr. Charles Richard Drew, M.D. Meredith Gourdine, Ph.D. Claude Harvard Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Frederick McKinley Jones Percy Lavon Julian, Ph.D. Ernest Everett Just, Ph.D. Lewis Howard Latimer Jan Earnst Matzeliger Elijah McCoy Benjamin Montgomery John P. Moon Garrett Augustus Morgan Norbert Rillieux Earl D. Shaw, Ph.D. Madame C. J. Walker Daniel Hale Williams, M.D. Gr... View More...
