Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

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Writer, Orator, Agitator and Champion of Human Rights.

Born in slavery, largely self-educated and self-liberated, Frederick Douglass rose against formidable odds to become a great American leader, not only in the fight for the abolition of slavery, but in the general cause of human rights. After the Civil War, Douglass utilizing his unique gifts as writer and orator, fought for equal rights for Negroes as zealously as he had fought for emancipation. He was actively associated with the campaign for equal rights for women. He was a champion of free education for “every poor man from Maine to Texas.” He played an important role in the early Negro labor movement. He was involved in the temperance crusade.

Having attained the distinguished position as advisor to President Lincoln, Douglass reached the apex of his astonishing career with his appointment a Minister  Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti. His autobiography, presented here as he finally completed and revised it in 1892, is a unique chronicle of seventy-eight crucial years in American history, and a  provocative and impressive self-portrait of an uncommon man.

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The first section of the book, the often assigned Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, is much easier reading than the political work he describes in Part 2 and 3. But a reader who sticks with Parts 2 and 3 will learn much about the Abolitionist movement in Part 2 and about the failures of Reconstruction in Part 3.

Cover of Before the Mayflower

Before the Mayflower-A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

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Reviews from Goodreads.com

* * * * *

This a great introduction, if not then the best introduction, to African American History. If you are wanting to know more about the story of African Americans this book is very readable and accurate. When I taught our school African American History class this was my text. My students liked it so much most of them went out and bought their own copies.

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Mr. Bennett gives voice to Black Americans, and to the cultures they brought with them. Through impeccable research, he has uncovered history and culture that was not readily available those many years ago. This book was published and available at almost the same time I finished my degree. I found it later when I had the luxury of being able to read what I wanted, rather than that which was assigned, and have used it to some degree in home schooling my son (though it is too difficult for most high school students). Highly readable and enormously enlightening.

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This was an amazing piece of work. I knew that people of color in this country had it rough but this truly shows just how bad. Even with all of the hardships people of color tried again and again to be the best that society would not let them. I was inspired by this book to continue to strive for progress and thus success. The stories of my ancestors have shown me that I come from a strong stock that can survived the worst of times so that I may have the best of times.

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From the inside flap of the print edition of 1962:

This is a history of the American Negro, whose ancestors arrived at Jamestown a year before the arrival of the “Mayflower.”

The book begins in Africa with the great empires of the Nile Valley and the western Sudan and ends with the Second Reconstruction, which Martin Luther King Jr. and the Sit-in Genera­tion are fashioning in the North and South. Written in a dramatic, readable style, Before The Mayflower throws a great deal of light on today’s headlines. As such, it will be a valuable addition to the library of every discerning American.

Grounded on the work of scholars and specialists, the book is designed for the non-specialist. Based on the trials and triumphs of Negro Americans, the book tells a story which is relevant to all men.

Here are the Negro Minute Men of Lexington and Concord and the black soldiers who stood with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans and Ulysses S. Grant at Petersburg.

Here also are the forgotten figures of American history: Phillis Wheatley, the slave poet who became the second American woman to write a book; Nat Turner, the mystic who led a bloody slave revolt; P. B. S. Pinchback, the Negro who sat in the Louisiana governor’s mansion and dreamed of the vice presidency.

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Freedom Ride, Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance by James Peck

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From the Forward by James Baldwin:
“The moral of [the Freedom Ride story is that, how­ever painful it may be for us to change, not to change will be fatal.”

From the Introduction by Lillian Smith:
“This is the vivid, detailed account of how a few people, accidentally or spontaneously, found the symbols that speak to everybody: the need to eat, the need to move—how they went at it, what they endured, how they changed within themselves. I am glad Jim Peck, who is a courageous and thoughtful participant in ideas and acts, wrote it down.”

After reading this work in manuscript. Lillian Smith wrote to James Peck: “I like your book very much. I was moved by it on certain pages, very deeply; and relived much of what I already knew about it.”

This vivid, deeply moving story, Freedom Ride, tells for the first time in book form of the nonviolent action to end segregation that was penetrating the South in the early 60s. Before its on-the-scene report of the 1961 Freedom Rides, it tells of the author’s experience with Jim Crow Bibles used in Southern courts, of segregated benches, shoe-shine stands, buses, churches, prisons, restaurants, rest rooms and waiting rooms.
It tells of a swimming pool in a New Jersey amusement park where white people could enter simply with the pur­chase of a ticket, but where blacks had to apply for membership to the “Sun & Surf Club” and wait forever. It tells of the student jail-ins, where decent citizens preferred to submit themselves to imprisonment rather than give up their “fightless fight” for humanity. And finally it tells of the now historic first Freedom Ride.
The author, James Peck, is a man whose quiet but passionate concern for human rights earned him fifty-three stitches in his head when, in Birming­ham, Alabama, he and the other Free­dom Riders tried to show that blacks and whites had the right to eat together in a bus terminal lunchroom. Here is his personal report.

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Cover shows Bethune leading children up a hill

Mary McLeod Bethune

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This is the challenging and inspired true story of a little girl who was determined to learn to read, and who went on to be a teacher, the founder of a college, an adviser to statesmen, and a great humanitarian. Mary McLeod Bethune was the fifteenth child of hardworking and god fearing parents. She was the first of their children to be born free. Her ancestry was wholly of African origin, a point of pride throughout her life.

Mrs. Bethune worked untiringly to restore—through education—her people’s faith in the magnificent heritage that is rightfully theirs. During the many years of and tribulation, she refused to give up her fondest dream—her own school for Negro children. And, as a shining monument to her hard work and faith, she has given to black youth the thriving institution of Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida.

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The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott

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In May 1905 Robert S. Abbott started publishing the Chicago Defender. The paper attacked racial injustice, particularly lynching in the south. The Defender did not use the words “Negro” or “black” in its pages. Instead, African Americans were referred to as “the Race” and black men and women as “Race men and Race women.” Many places in the south effectively banned the paper, especially when, during World War I, Abbott actively tried to convince southern blacks to migrate to the north. Abbott managed to get railroad porters to carry his papers south and he ran articles, editorials, cartoons -even train schedules and job listings to convince the Defender’s southern readers to come north. The “Great Northern Migration,” as it was called in the Defender, resulted in more than one million blacks migrating north, about 100,000 of them coming to Chicago. The Defender was passed from person to person, and read aloud in barbershops and churches. It is estimated that at its height each paper sold was read by four to five African Americans, putting its readership at over 500,000 people each week.

Son of ex-slaves, Abbott passed from small-town obscurity to national preeminence, due neither to great wealth nor hereditary status, but by sheer character, determination and imagination. He was a crusading journalist, who ultimately developed into a national leader, and, in the process, became a millionaire. As a newspaper editor, he influenced and molded the opinions of millions of Negroes in the United States, and therefore his career is of unique interest—indeed, his extraordinary achievement is a triumphant American success story.

The roots of greatness should be sought in a man’s formative years. Until now, most Negroes who have achieved anything noteworthy seemingly have no traceable background—notably Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver—and like Topsy seem merely to have “growed up.” But Abbott’s accomplishments represent continuity of family enterprise and perseverance. However, the purpose of this volume is not at all genealogical. Essentially, this is a biography of a people, for Abbott’s life and times spanned the most triumphant period of the Negro in the United States. Born three years after the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation, he lived to see and chronicle the spectacular progress of his people.

In the burgeoning economic times of the 1920s, with hundreds of new products and the growth of advertising, the Defender became an economic success and Abbott became one of the first African American millionaires.

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Thurgood Marshall facing right

Thurgood Marshall: From His Early Years to Brown by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark

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Editorial reviews:

“Michael Davis and Hunter Clark have crafted a thoughtful, carefully researched and focused biography.” —USA Today

“Well-written, informative and lively.” —People

“Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark offer a masterfully written tale of an American legend.” — Gannett News Service

“Filled with the same fire, passion and humor that drove Marshall’s life, Thurgood Marshall is a revealing portrait of a pioneering lawyer.” —National Black Review

This ebook edition is the first half of the 1992 print edition of “Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench.” This new edition covers Thurgood Marshall’s youth, education, and the legal strategies he used, and the cases he argued leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The reviews above are from the print edition.

Publisher’s Note:
Chapter 1 describes Thurgood Marshall’s place in history.
Chapter 2 explains the challenges Marshall and the attorneys of the N.A.A.C.P were to face as they built the precedents that led to the Brown decision.
Chapter 3 is about Marshall’s childhood in Jim Crow Baltimore, and is probably the best starting point for high school students who want to begin with a straight-forward story of the life of a courageous leader. This chapter lends itself to writing assignments such as “Compare your public school years to what Thurgood Marshall experienced in Baltimore.” Not only will students have to read the chapter to complete the writing assignment, but there will be space for their own voices in the assignment. They may find this comparison more interesting than a book report.
Chapter 4 describes his years in Howard University Law School, and the work of his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, who saw how the law school and its graduates could fight racial injustice.
Subsequent chapters describe the work Marshall did on the cases leading up to the Brown decision, his civil rights work in the South, and his push for fair treatment of Black G.I.s during the Korean War.

Cover showing Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court

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Editorial Reviews:

“Michael Davis and Hunter Clark have crafted a thoughtful, carefully researched and focused biography.” —USA Today

“I highly recommend Thurgood Marshall by Mike Davis and Hunter Clark. This impressive book captures the sweeping drama and courageous struggles that have filled Thurgood Marshall’s life and career. The story of Justice Marshall is that of one of the greatest Americans in the twentieth century. Davis and Clark provide a compelling portrait of Marshall’s immense humanity and integrity in this fine biography.” —Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta.

“Thurgood Marshall is a giant of a man at a time when giants are scarce and desperately needed. This wonderful biography takes his measure.” —(Rev.) Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., President Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

“Davis and Clark have given us an engagingly written and conscientiously researched biography of a twentieth-century icon. It should be widely read and much discussed by all who care about the large, principled issues Justice Marshall’s life embodies.” —David Levering Lewis, author of W. E. B. Dubois: Biography of a Race

“Michael B. Davis and Hunter R. Clark have written an interesting and informative biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall directed toward a general audience. The current work, with its fluid, readable style, reflects the authors’ backgrounds in the popular press, where both have published extensively.”—Mississippi Quarterly

This ebook edition is the second half of the 1992 print edition. This new edition covers Thurgood Marshall’s victory in Brown, the resistance to the Brown decision, and his years on the Supreme Court. The reviews above are from the print edition of 1992 titled, Thurgood Marshall:Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench.

 

Photo of James Weldon Johnson

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

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Epub or Mobi?
The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices and in one case for Amazon devices. As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send to Kindle program. A great feature of the Send to Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send to Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

So if you are using this ebook on Apple, or Android devices, or in the Send to Kindle program, you can download this epub file below.

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If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

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From Reviewers on Goodreads:

I have to admit, for a good while I had no idea that this was a novel. It is so convincing as an “autobiography” that I believed this to be Johnson’s own story. Some of it is, from what I glean off the back cover blurb. Whatever the case, it is a book that is immediately engrossing; a remarkably evocative time capsule that whisks and immerses the reader into the world of early 20th-century America…

…The book is a vibrant and fulsomely descriptive evocation of black American life in the early 20th century and is at the same time an exuberant celebration of black culture and of the often unremarked contributions to the world of black Americans and their ancestors.

The novel is honest, flavorful and lovingly rendered, and even with all that has come to pass it remains relevant.

I loved nearly every word of it.

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This is a book where a lot of things happen one right after the other and yet it didn’t strike me as episodic. It flowed very naturally. Overall, I’m very happy to have read this classic and would recommend highly to everyone. The curiosity and amusement which led to my picking up the book was anthropological in nature but I also ended up just enjoying a very good and interesting story. This really is an outstanding book.

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James Weldon Johnson wrote two autobiographies, this fictional one of a character referred to only as the Ex-Colored Man, which he published anonymously in 1912, and Along This Way, relating his own remarkable life and career, published only four years before his tragic death in 1938, when the car he was riding in, driven by his wife, was hit by a train.

The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man is his most famous book and it recounts the life of a biracial man born in a small town in Georgia just after the Civil War. He benefits from his black mother’s nurturing and guidance, his absent white father’s financial support of them both, and his innate intelligence and musical abilities. His discovery at school that he is not white shocks him and casts a shadow over his future. He can “pass” for white, however, and the main theme of the book is his struggle over whether to identify as white or black.

Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida; unlike the Ex-Colored Man, who planned to attend Atlanta University but never did, he graduated from there in 1894. Among other achievements are his admission to the Florida State Bar in 1897 as the first African-American to do so since Reconstruction, successful Broadway music career with his brother Rosamond, service as U.S. Consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela and Corinto, Nicaragua, appointment as first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and career as professor of literature at Fisk University in Nashville and New York University.

I highly recommend this book and plan to read Johnson’s own autobiography, as well. I have to give a shout out to James K. White, whose narration of the free LibriVox audiobook I listened to was outstanding. (Here is the audiobook.)

Flight to Freedom: The Story of the Underground Railroad by Henrietta Buckmaster

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This is a story of almost unbelievable heroism and great daring, told with gusto and sincerity. It is told through the lives of courageous men and women—some of them known to us by name; most of them, unknown.

The Underground Railroad maneuvered the escape of Southern slaves to the North. It was carried on at first by a handful of people: Quakers, ministers, farmers, journalists, the escaped slaves themselves. The movement spread, and eventually the network extended from Georgia to Iowa, from Alabama to Canada.

The North Star was the slave’s hope . . . “keep on going north, and if you do not die, you will find freedom.” Going north meant careful planning, hairbreadth escapes at night, slow journeys through swamps and forests, careful disguises along open roads. It meant hunger, weariness, and dread. But the rewards of freedom from slavery were worth all the suffering.

Henrietta Buckmaster has told this little-known story against a background of the times.

But history is made by people. So Flight to Freedom is the story of people: Harriet Tubman, Levi Coffin, Wendell Phillips, Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass—and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose vivid picture of slavery hastened the climax of a conflict that had been brewing since the first slaves were brought to these shores from Africa in chains.

It is a glorious story the author tells, a dramatic chapter in our history. It is a story that is not yet finished.

Book Cover with Text the Fire in the Flint

The Fire in the Flint by Walter F. White

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In this novel Kenneth Harper a southern born but northern trained African American physician returns from World War I to start a medical clinic and practice in southern Georgia.  He is flush from his good treatment by whites in the north and in Europe so he expects such treatment in the south.  His brother warns him but he soon learns that southern white treatment for “negroes” will not allow him to set up the clinic for all that he wants to.  The novel is the story of his slow downfall as he finds out that even sympathetic whites will not challenge the racism of their colleagues, runs afoul of the Ku Klux Klan, has his brother lynched and his sister raped by white men.  He ends being lynched himself while killing some whites in the process. The novel was published in 1924 and met with success. He tried unsuccessfully to have the novel turned into a play or movie.

As a member of the NAACP, Walter White investigated lynchings and worked to end segregation. He was the organization’s executive secretary from 1931 to 1955. White was also a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance. His books included A Man Called White, and Flight, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch.