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My Face Is Black Is True

My Face Is Black Is True

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Written by Mary Frances BerryAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Mary Frances Berry

  • Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
  • Publisher: Knopf
  • On Sale: September 6, 2005
  • Price: $26.95
  • ISBN: 978-1-4000-4003-2 (1-4000-4003-5)
Also available as an eBook and a trade paperback.
about this book

“My face is black is true but its not my fault but I love my name and my honest in dealing with my fellow man.”
--Callie House (1899)

In her groundbreaking new book, My Face Is Black Is True, historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the forgotten life of Callie House (1861-1928), ex-slave, widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five who, seventy years before the civil rights movement, headed a demand for ex-slave reparations.

Callie House, so long forgotten that her grave has been lost, emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. My Face is Black Is True is a fascinating book of original scholarship that reclaims a magnificent heroine.

"My Face Is Black Is True reclaims Callie House as an authentic American hero who over a century ago argued that America's debt to its more than four million enslaved founders was long overdue. Dr. Mary Frances Berry brilliantly brings the issue of slave reparations to the forefront of American history.”
--Christopher Moore, author of Fighting for America: Black Soldiers--The Unsung Heroes of WWII