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Author
Language
English
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Description
Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
Author
Publisher
Atria/One Signal Publishers
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Formats
Description
Written by her great-granddaughter, a historical portrait of the boundary-breaking civil rights pioneer covers Wells' early years as a slave, her famous acts of resistance, and her achievements as a journalist and anti-lynching activist.
Journalist. Suffragist. Antilynching crusader. Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Though she died in 1931, her impact looms large over the country's slow movements toward progress....
3) Kindred
Author
Series
Language
English
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Description
Dana, a black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
Author
Series
Language
English
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Description
"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar....
7) Sula
Author
Pub. Date
2007
Language
English
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Formats
Description
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Nel and Sula’s devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the...
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Nel and Sula’s devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the...
Author
Publisher
Beacon Press
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
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Formats
Description
"A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component...
Author
Publisher
Kensington Books
Pub. Date
2015
Language
English
Formats
Description
Halia Watkins, the owner of a well-loved soul food restaurant in Prince George's County, Maryland, investigates after a smooth-talking, shady entrepreneur turns up murdered in her kitchen, right next to her cast iron frying pan.
Welcome to Mahalia's Sweet Tea--the finest soul food restaurant in Prince George's County, Maryland. In between preparing her famous cornbread and mashed potatoes so creamy "they'll make you want to slap your Momma," owner...
10) House of cotton
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Meet Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean...Earl's All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed "the Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life's storms together for the next four decades. Now, during their most challenging year yet, dutiful, proud, and talented Clarice must struggle to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband's humiliating infidelities. Beautiful,...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the space race, [this book] follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances, and used their intellect to change their own...
Author
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...
14) Anywhere you run
Author
Pub. Date
2022
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
It?s the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one year old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she?s ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet?s skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before anyone...
15) The help
Author
Language
English
Description
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Formats
Description
The first in a thrilling new series from Emmy Award-winning TV Host and Journalist Tamron Hall, As The Wicked Watch follows a reporter as she unravels the disturbing mystery around the deaths of two Black girls; the work of a serial killer terrorizing Chicago. When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she's one step closer to her dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network....
19) Becoming
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
20) Promise
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
2018
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart--one black, one white; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager--fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel."--Publisher annotation.
A devastating tornado rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression. Dovey, a black laundress,...