Cultural Literature

A brilliant and brilliantly different (Kiese Laymon), wrenching and redemptive coming-of-age memoir about the difficulty of growing up in a hazardous home and the glory of finding salvation in geek culture. Stranded within an ever-shifting family's...

Journalist and author Mark Whitaker explores the momentous year that redefined the civil rights movement as a new sense of Black identity expressed in the slogan Black Power challenged the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis...

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person...

The witnesses of segregation still live among us, and award-winning broadcaster and educator Alvin Hall sets out to record their dramatic memories. He uses The Green Book, the guide that helped Black people travel safely on the nation's highways and...

An epic story, Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and...

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as "his" slave.In 1848, a year of international democratic...

True is a probing, richly-detailed, unique biography of Jackie Robinson, one of baseball's--and America's--most significant figures.For players, fans, managers, and executives, Jackie Robinson remains baseball's singular figure, the person who most...

Behind the Beautiful Forevers meets Under an Afghan Sky in this mesmerizing true story of the Nigerian girls taken captive by the terrorist group Boko HaramIn April 2014, the world awoke to the shocking news that the terrorist group Boko Haram had...

The definitive account of Whitney Houston's astonishing life, ground-breaking career, and tragic death -- complete with never-before-seen photographs -- from the only one who truly knows the story behind the headlines: her mother, Cissy Houston.Cissy has...

Mia Love, the first Black Republican congresswoman in America, shows readers how to own their stories, find their voices, and lead with character as they empower others to do the same. For so long, women--and Black women in particular--have been taught...

The story of a man who transcended the handicaps of race to become America's first African American mega sports celebrity At the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of lightning-fast racers won the hearts and minds of a bicycling-crazed public. Scientists...