A new biography of one of the key composers of 20th-century American popular song and jazz,Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race illuminates Blake's little-known impact on over 100 years of American culture. A gifted musician, Blake rose from performing in dance halls and bordellos of his native Baltimore to the heights of Broadway. In 1921, together with performer and lyricist Noble Sissle, Blake created Shuffle Along which became a sleeper smash on Broadway eventually becoming one of the top ten...
Dream of the Water Children – Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific
by Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd, Karen Chau, Gerald Horne, and Velina Hasu Houston
Born to an African American father and Japanese mother, Frederick D. Kakinami Cloyd, the narrator of Dream of the Water Children, finds himself not only to be a marginalized person by virtue of his heritage, but often a cultural drifter, as well. Indeed, both his family and his society treat him as if he doesn’t entirely belong to any world. Tautly written in spare, clear poetic prose, this memoir explores the specific contours of Japanese and African American cultures, as well as the broader ex...
The barrier-breaking actress best known for her roles in Julia and Grey's Anatomy discusses her four marriages, including her courtship with Sidney Poitier, the racial and sexual politics that shaped her roles in Hollywood and on Broadway, and the personal cost of her career.
Up From Slavery: The Incredible Life Story of Booker T. Washington
by Booker T Washington
Up from Slavery" is the autobiography of Booker T. Washington sharing his personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, to his work establishing vocational schools—most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by...
2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner - Biography & Autobiography The fascinating biography of Eunice Hunton Carter, a social justice and civil rights trailblazer and the only woman prosecutor on the Luciano trial Eunice Hunton Carter rose to public prominence in 1936 as both the only woman and the only person of color on Thomas Dewey's famous gangbuster team that prosecuted mobster Lucky Luciano. But her life before and after the trial remains relatively unknown. In this definitive biography on t...
The extraordinary life of Jackie Robinson is illuminated as never before in this full-scale biography by Arnold Rampersad, who was chosen by Jack's widow, Rachel, to tell her husband's story, and was given unprecedented access to his private papers. We are brought closer than we have ever been to the great ballplayer, a man of courage and quality who became a pivotal figure in the areas of race and civil rights. Born in the rural South, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was reared in southern...
A searingly honest memoir of one young woman’s journey toward self-acceptance as she comes to see her body as a symbol of rebellion and hope and chooses to live her life unapologetically. Ever since she was little, Leah Vernon was told what to believe and how to act. There wasn’t any room for imperfection. Good Muslim girls listened more than they spoke. They didn’t have a missing father or a mother with a mental disability. They didn’t have fat bodies or grow up wishing they could be like the...
