"Yamacraw Island was haunting, nearly deserted, and beautiful. Separated from the mainland of South Carolina by a wide tidal river, it was accessible only by boat. But for the handful of families that lived on Yamacraw, America was a world away. For years these families lived proudly from the sea until waste from industry destroyed the oyster beds essential to their very existence. Already poor, they knew they would have to face an uncertain future...

Overview: Dr. King's best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963. Often applauded as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can't Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United...

"In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement to veteran writer and journalist Alex Haley." -- dust jacket.

Four young women living in a convent near Ruby, Oklahoma, are viciously attacked in 1976 after residents become convinced the women are the source of the problems that have been sweeping the exclusively African-American community.

Four generations of black life in America. Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins,...

Sidney Poitier ws the first black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor for his outstanding performance in Liliees of the Field in 1963. His landmark films include The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, Guess ho's Coming to Dinner, and To Sir With Love. Among many other accolades, Poitier has been awarded the Screen Actor Guild's highest honor, the Life Achievement Award, for an outtanding career and humanitarian accomplishment.

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever." The story tells of a Black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances...

"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.

After falling for Kate, her unexpected death sends Jack back in time to the moment they first met. He soon learns that his actions have consequences when someone else close to him dies.

The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in an automobile accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car, and many others in the school.