Madam C.J. Walker - reputed to be America's first self-made woman millionaire - has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in teh aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed and twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death...

In this new biography, distinguished historian Paul Harvey examines Martin Luther King's life through his complex, emerging religious lives. Harvey introduces many readers, perhaps for the first or only time, to the King of diverse religious and intellectual influences, of an increasingly radical cast of thought, and of a m©♭lange of intellectual influences that he aligned in becoming the spokesperson for the most important social movement of twentieth-century...

In the twentieth century, African Americans not only helped make popular music the soundtrack of the American experience, they advanced American music as one of the preeminent shapers of the world's popular culture. Vast numbers of black American musicians deserve credit for this remarkable turn of events, but a few stand out as true giants. David Stricklin's superb new biography explores the life of one of them, Louis Armstrong. The life story of...

The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him "the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington." For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation's most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown...

Madam C. J. Walker is reputed to be America's first self-made woman millionaire. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire...