Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns...

Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.

This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,"...

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...

"The Confessions of Nat Turner reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, William Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations-and hopes-which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who had held his people in bondage."--provided by publisher

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his fatherb7sa figure he knows more as a myth than as a manb7shas been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odysseyb7sfirst to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration...

Set in South Carolina in 1964, [this book] tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters...

"The classic, bestselling book on the psychology of racism-now fully revised and updated Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling...

Delve into the turbulent roots of race relations in the United States with this inspirational account from Booker T. Washington, a one-time slave who became an important advocate for African-American education and founded several well-known institutions of higher learning, including the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

"Novelist Will Thomas had been a logger in Maine, a crew member on a fishing boat in Alaska, a prizefighter on the West Coast, a scriptwriter in Los Angeles, and a journalist in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. In 1946 he, his wife, and three children abandoned a plan to move to Haiti to escape racial prejudice in the United States. Instead, they made the improbable decision to purchase a home in tiny Westford, Vermont, twenty miles northeast of...