A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: July 27, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51101-0 (0-345-51101-8)

Selected for Common Reading at the University of Illinois, Springfield

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since... Read more >

A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: August 25, 2009
Price: $27.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51100-3 (0-345-51100-X)

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Carlotta's account of events inside and... Read more >

Bound for the Promised Land
Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero
Written by Kate Clifford Larson

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: December 28, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-45628-1 (0-345-45628-9)

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history—a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the nine decades since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside... Read more >

Jumped In
What Gangs Taught Me about Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption
Written by Jorja Leap

Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: January 8, 2013
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4481-0 (0-8070-4481-4)

When Jorja Leap began studying Los Angeles gang violence in 2002, she encountered a myriad of proposed solutions to the seemingly intractable “gang problem” and set out to discover what was really going on. The stakes–then and now–could not be higher: a child or teenager is killed by gunfire every three... Read more >

Jumped In
What Gangs Taught Me about Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption
Written by Jorja Leap

Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: March 6, 2012
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4456-8 (0-8070-4456-3)

Jumped In tells the story of the gangs of Los Angeles in the words of the gang members themselves as well as the people who interact with them on a daily basis--trying to arrest them, control them, and help them. There are priests and police officers, murderers and drug dealers, victims... Read more >

The Promised Land
The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
Written by Nicholas Lemann

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 31, 1992
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73347-8 (0-679-73347-7)

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History

The Promised Land is an examination of the profound social, political, and economic effects upon the United States after the 20th century migration of five million blacks from the rural South to the urban North.  Lemann traces the lives of a number... Read more >

New York Burning
Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
Written by Jill Lepore

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 8, 2006
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3226-6 (1-4000-3226-1)

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner

Over a frigid few weeks in the winter of 1741, ten fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. In the end, thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen were hanged and more than one hundred... Read more >

Black Women in White America
A Documentary History
Edited by Gerda Lerner

Format: Trade Paperback, 672 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 17, 1992
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74314-9 (0-679-74314-6)

Recipient of the 2002 Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing

In this "stunning collection of documents" (Washington Post Book World), African-American women speak of themselves, their lives, ambitions, and struggles from the colonial period to the present day. Theirs are stories of oppression and survival, of family and community... Read more >

The Secret Epidemic
The Story of AIDS and Black America
Written by Jacob Levenson

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 8, 2005
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72234-6 (0-385-72234-6)

As we enter the twenty-first century, AIDS in America has become primarily a black disease. African Americans now constitute 50 percent of all new HIV cases, and AIDS is one of the top causes of death in young black men and women. The story of how this came to pass reaches... Read more >

The Fall of the House of Dixie
The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South
Written by Bruce Levine

Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: January 8, 2013
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6703-9 (1-4000-6703-0)

To read the author’s essay about The Fall of the House of Dixie: Ammending Civil War Narrative and request a free review copy of the book, go to: http://tiny.cc/u1rqrw

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political... Read more >

The First Emancipator
Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter
Written by Andrew Levy

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 9, 2007
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-76104-1 (0-375-76104-7)

“[Andrew Levy] brings a literary sensibility to the study of history, and has written a richly complex book, one that transcends Carter’s story to consider larger questions of individual morality and national memory.”
–The New York Times Book Review

In 1791, Robert Carter III, a pillar of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy, broke with his... Read more >

Harriet Tubman
Imagining a Life
Written by Beverly Lowry

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: June 10, 2008
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-72177-6 (0-385-72177-3)

From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of Her People.”

Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. In Harriet Tubman, Lowry creates a portrait enriched with... Read more >

Her Dream of Dreams
The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker
Written by Beverly Lowry

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76803-6 (0-679-76803-3)

“I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub; then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.” —Madam C. J. Walker, National Negro Business... Read more >

Common Ground
A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
Written by J. Anthony Lukas

Format: Trade Paperback, 688 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 12, 1986
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-394-74616-6 (0-394-74616-3)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
Winner of the American Book Award

In this extraordinary prize-winning work of reportage, Lukas brings to life the school integration crisis in Boston and by extension the crisis of urban America in the ten... Read more >

Autobiography of Malcolm X

Written by Malcolm X

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: January 15, 1992
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-37671-8 (0-345-37671-4)

If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was Malcolm X. His Autobiography is now an established classic of modern American literature, a book that expresses like no other, the crucial truth about race and racism... Read more >

Autobiography of Malcolm X

Written by Malcolm X

Format: Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: October 12, 1987
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-345-35068-8 (0-345-35068-5)

Now an established classic of modern American literature, a book that expresses like none other the issues of race and racism in our time. This is the story of an activist whose voice and philosophy resonate from every page and whose experiences and intelligence continue to speak to millions about the... Read more >

Angry Black White Boy
A Novel
Written by Adam Mansbach

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: March 8, 2005
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5487-9 (1-4000-5487-7)

**Currently taught in courses at over thirty colleges and universities nationwide**

From the acclaimed author of Shackling Water comes the first great race novel of the twenty-first century, an incendiary and ruthlessly funny satire about violence, pop culture, and American identity.

Macon Detornay is a suburban white boy possessed and politicized by black... Read more >

Beyond Glory
Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
Written by David Margolick

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 10, 2006
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72619-4 (0-375-72619-5)

Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling—bouts that symbolized and galvanized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war.

David Margolick takes us into the careers of both... Read more >

To a Young Jazz Musician
Letters from the Road
Written by Wynton Marsalis and Selwyn Seyfu Hinds

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: November 8, 2005
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7420-1 (0-8129-7420-4)

In To a Young Jazz Musician, the renowned jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize—winning composer Wynton Marsalis gives us an invaluable guide to making good music–and to leading a good life.
Writing from the road “between the bus ride, the sound check, and the gig,”

Marsalis passes on wisdom gained from experience, addressed... Read more >

Makes Me Wanna Holler
A Young Black Man in America
Written by Nathan Mc Call

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 31, 1995
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-74070-4 (0-679-74070-8)

In this autobiography Washington Post reporter McCall looks back on his journey from troubled youth to professional journalist and shows that the easy answers to why kids go wrong--poverty, terrible home life, lack of education--do not always apply. "The problems among us," he writes of acquaintances who ended up addicted, imprisoned... Read more >

What's Going On

Written by Nathan Mc Call

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 29, 1998
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70150-4 (0-375-70150-8)

In What's Going On, McCall firmly establishes himself as a commentator for our times, drawing on personal experience and current events to deconstruct the social, cultural, and political tensions that, in clearly seen and not so obvious ways, affect us every day. With his trademark blend of honesty, originality, and insight... Read more >

Dear Marcus
A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me
Written by Jerry McGill

Format: Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
On Sale: May 1, 2012
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9307-3 (0-8129-9307-1)

When Jerry McGill was growing up in the housing projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, his future seemed bright: Though times were tough for a family led by a single mother, McGill was a charming, precocious teenager, already excelling as an athlete and a dancer. But... Read more >

At the Dark End of the Street
Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Written by Danielle L. McGuire

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 4, 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38924-4 (0-307-38924-3)

Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement.

The truth of who Rosa Parks was and... Read more >

The Negro's Civil War
How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union
Written by James M. McPherson

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 14, 2003
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3390-4 (1-4000-3390-X)

In this classic study, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson deftly narrates the experience of blacks--former slaves and soldiers, preachers, visionaries, doctors, intellectuals, and common people--during the Civil War. Drawing on contemporary journalism, speeches, books, and letters, he presents an eclectic chronicle of their fears and hopes as well as their... Read more >

Voices in Our Blood
America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement
Written by Jon Meacham

Format: Trade Paperback, 576 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 7, 2003
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75881-2 (0-375-75881-X)

Voices in Our Blood is a literary anthology of the most important and artful interpretations of the civil rights movement, past and present. It showcases what forty of the nation's best writers—including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard... Read more >