African American Authors: LITERATURE

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who will become Dana's ancestor. Yet each time Dana's sojourns become longer and more dangerous, until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end, long before it has even begun

The life of a thirteen-year-old Harlem black boy on his way to becoming a confirmed heroin addict is seen from his viewpoint and from that of several people around him

Of our spiritual strivings -- Of the dawn of freedom -- Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and others -- Of the meaning of progress -- Of the wings of Atalanta -- Of the training of black men -- Of the black belt -- Of the quest of the golden fleece -- Of the sons of master and man -- Of the faith of the fathers -- Of the passing of the first-born -- Of Alexander Crummell -- Of the coming of John -- The sorrow songs

Story of a black lady born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, freed at the end of the Civil War, who lives for one-hundred more years

The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist. She draws parallels with the despair of her country--Dominica--attributing it to the legacy of slavery. By the author of Lucy.

A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders

Max Disher, a black 1930s insurance salesman, undergoes a process to turn him white

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels

A black woman recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums

Prefatory notes on the African slave trade -- Maya Angelou -- Quincy Jones -- Morgan Freeman -- Tina Turner -- Peter J. Gomes -- Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot -- Tom Joyner -- Benjamin Carson -- Oprah Winfrey -- Whoopi Goldberg -- Mae Jemison -- T.D. Jakes -- Linda Johnson Rice -- Kathleen Henderson -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee -- Don Cheadle -- Chris Rock -- Bliss Broyard -- Chris Tucker -- How to trace your own roots.

1900-1909. W.E.B. Dubois ; T. Thomas Fortune ; Matthew Henson ; Jack Johnson ; Scott Joplin ; Henry Ossawa Tanner ; Madame C.J. Walker ; Booker T. Washington ; Ida B. Wells Barnett ; Bert Williams -- 1910-1919. Mary McLeod Bethune ; George Washington Carver ; Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. ; Thomas A. Dorsey ; W.C. Handy ; James Weldon Johnson ; Jelly Roll Morton ; Charles Henry Turner ; Jimmy Winkfield ; Carter G. Woodson -- 1920-1929. Louis Armstrong ; Junius Austin ; Josephine Baker ; Bessie Coleman ; Marcus Garvey ; Langston Hughes ; Ernest Everett Just ; Oscar Micheaux ; Bessie Smith ; Jean Toomer -- 1930-1939. Marian Anderson ; Sterling A. Brown ; Father Divine ; Charles Hamilton Houston ; Zora Neale Hurston ; Robert Johnson ; Joe Louis ; Jesse Owens ; Paul Robeson ; Bill "Bojangles" Robinson -- 1940-1949. Charles R. Drew ; Katherine Dunham ; Duke Ellington ; Billie Holiday ; Lena Horne ; Jacob Lawrence ; Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. ; A. Philip Randolph ; Jackie Robinson ; Richard Wright -- 1950-1959. Ralph Bunche ; Nat "King" Cole ; Miles Davis ; Ralph Ellison ; Althea Gibson ; Lorraine Hansberry ; Willie Mays ; Rosa Parks ; Art Tatum ; Sarah Vaughan -- 1960-1969. Muhammad Ali ; James Baldwin ; John Coltrane ; Angela Davis ; Fannie Lou Hamer ; Jimi Hendrix ; Martin Luther King, Jr. ; Thurgood Marshall ; Sidney Poitier ; Malcolm X -- 1970-1979. Hank Aaron ; Maya Angelou ; Romare Bearden ; James Brown ; Marvin Gaye ; Barbara Harris ; Dorothy Height ; Barbara Jordan ; Leontyne Price ; Richard Pryor -- 1980-1989. Alvin Ailey ; Bill Cosby ; John Hope Franklin ; Jesse Jackson ; Michael Jackson ; Carl Lewis ; Jessye Norman ; Martin Puryear ; Alice Walker ; August Wilson -- 1990-1999. Louis Farrakhan ; Michael Jordan ; Spike Lee ; Wynton Marsalis ; Toni Morrison ; Colin Powell ; Tupac Shakur ; Denzel Washington ; Oprah Winfrey ; Tiger Woods

Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was. Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King's revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism. As West writes, "Although much of America did not know the radical King--and too few know today--the FBI and US government did. They called him 'the most dangerous man in America.' This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize

The authors re-examine our assumptions about poverty in America--what it really is and how to eliminate it now.
Contents:
Portrait of poverty -- Poverty of opportunity -- Poverty of affirmation -- Poverty of courage -- Poverty of compassion -- Poverty of imagination -- A poverty manifesto