Catalog Search Results
1) Roots
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 48
Lexile measure
1330L
Language
English
Description
"A condensed version of a portion of this work first appeared in Reader's digest."
Alex Haley traces his family's history from the mid-18th century when one of his ancestors, Kunte Kinte, was captured and sold into slavery. He follows the struggle for freedom that began with the boy's abduction to America and continued throughout the generations that followed.
Author
Language
English
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...
Author
Lexile measure
1330L
Language
English
Description
This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the seventeen-year-old Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from his home in Gambia and transported as a slave to colonial America. In this account Haley provides an imaginative...
Author
Language
English
Description
Discusses the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family that had blood ties to Thomas Jefferson, who had an intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave, and covers how the family of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles came under ownership to Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The daughter of actress Lena Horne traces the lives of her family between two major human rights periods in America, sharing the stories of the branches of her family that lived in the North and South, and their experiences during the Jim Crow and wartime eras.
Author
Language
English
Description
Former secretary of state Rice only briefly treats her tenure during the second Bush administration in favor of a straightforward, reverential chronicle of her upbringing under two teachers in the segregated Deep South. Rice acknowledges upfront the complicated, intertwined history of blacks and whites in America, which lent a lightening of skin to her forebears that was looked upon favorably at the time. Her father, John Wesley Rice Jr., came from...
Author
Language
English
Description
Chronicling her remarkable journey to definitively understand her heritage and reclaim it, a black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings' family offers a compelling portrait to ensure the nation lives up to the ideals advocated by her legendary ancestor.
White had long heard the stories that her father's family were direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson. For four decades she researched her connection to Thomas Jefferson, to confirm its...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"Cassandra Lane's debut memoir WE ARE BRIDGES follows her late entry into pregnancy and motherhood. As she prepares to give birth, she traces the history of her Black American family in the early twentieth-century rural South, including the lynching of her great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, and the pregnancy of her great-grandmother, Mary. With almost no physical record of her ancestors, Cassandra crafts a narrative of familial love and loss to pass...
Author
Language
English
Description
This book is unlike any memoir you'll ever read. Moving in its frankness, it is a relentless tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it with a furious wit and unyielding determination. Cupcake Brown is a dynamic and original storyteller who will guide you on the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you'll ever take.--From publisher description.
Author
Language
English
Description
"Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However,...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.7 - AR Pts: 25
Language
English
Formats
Description
As the country enters a new era of conversations around race and the enduring impact of slavery, The Hairstons traces the rise and fall of the largest slaveholding family in the Old South as its descendants-both black and white-grapple with the twisted legacy of their past.
Spanning two centuries of one family's history, The Hairstons tells the extraordinary story of the Hairston clan, once the wealthiest family in the Old South and the largest slaveholder...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A history of the rise and lasting impact of Black liberation groups in America, as seen through the Shakurs, one of the movement's most prominent and fiercely creative families, home to Tupac and Assata, and a powerful incubator for today's activism, scholarship, and artistry"--
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
"Jodie Patterson is the mother of five children, including her ten-year-old transgender son Penelope, the catalyst for the author's reexamination of identity within her own dynamic household--and the wider world. This inspiring and highly personal debut memoir goes on to examine Jodie's extended families' African American experiences with racism and civil rights, and her own coming of age in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, and later on as a wife,...
Author
Language
English
Description
She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s--and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city's underworld, she was the only member of...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Equal parts investigative and deeply introspective, The Wreck is a profound memoir about recognizing the echoes of history within ourselves, and the alchemy of turning inherited grief into political activism. There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn't know, and it's evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. It's not until she meets her extended family for the first time that she realizes she is named after-and looks...
Author
Language
English
Description
Through his own riveting story, Datcher offers a view of young black men who long for loving, stable marriages, fatherhood, and homes in safe neighborhoods. He also writes of his desires and those of other black men to escape a cycle that deprives children of what they need most and creates empty shells of grown men.
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