A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Martin Luther King Jr. · 230 pages

Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of desegrated city bus service.

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

John Lewis, Michael D'Orso · 526 pages

The son of an Alabama sharecropper, and now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life, one that found him at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis was present at all the major battlefields of the movement. Arrested more than forty times and severely beat

Leon's Story

Leon Walter Tillage · 107 pages

Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin · 190 pages

Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre

Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South

Anne Moody · 384 pages

Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. In this now classic autobiography, she details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of the black girl who had the courage to challenge it. The result is a touc

Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

Rosa Parks: My Story

Rosa Parks, James Haskins · 208 pages

Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · 638 pages

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader

Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Angela Y. Davis · 400 pages

Her own powerful story to 1972, told with warmth, brilliance, humor & conviction. The author, a political activist, reflects upon the people & incidents that have influenced her life & commitment to global liberation of the oppressed.

Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98

George Dawson, Richard Glaubman · 280 pages

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X, Alex Haley · 484 pages

The Heart of a Woman

Maya Angelou · 280 pages

Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for

My Grandfather's Son

Clarence Thomas · 289 pages

The Supreme Court justice recounts his life story, from his impoverished childhood in Jim Crow-era Georgia and his struggles to acquire an education, to his publicly contested confirmation to the nation's highest court.

Assata: An Autobiography

Assata Shakur · 274 pages

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (previously known as JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationa

A Taste of Power - A Black Woman's Story

Elaine Brown · 452 pages

Brown's account of her life at the highest levels of the Black Panther party's hierarchy. More than a journey through a turbulent time in American history, this is the story of a black woman's battle to define herself.

While the World Watched

Carolyn Maull McKinstry · 301 pages

On September 15, 1963, a Klan-planted bomb went off in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Fourteen-year-old Carolyn Maull was just a few feet away when the bomb exploded, killing four of her friends in the girl's rest room she had just exited. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history ... and the turning point in a young girl'

Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years

Sarah L. Delany, A. Elizabeth Delany, Amy Hill Hearth · 320 pages

March: Book Two

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin · 189 pages

Die Nigger Die!

H. Rap Brown, Jamil al-Amin · 145 pages

"More than any other black leader, H. Rap Brown, chairman of the radical Black Power organization SNCC, came to symbolize the ideology of black revolution. Die Nigger Die! - first published in 1969 and long unavailable - tells the story of the making of a revolutionary. Much more than a personal history, it is a call to arms, an urgent message to the black community to be the vanguard force in the

Lakota Woman

Mary Crow Dog, Richard Erdoes · 263 pages

A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world. This is the powerful autobiography of Mary Brave Bird, who grew up in the misery of a South Dakota reservation. Rebelling against the violence and hopelessness of reservation life, she joined the tribal pride movement in an effort to bring a

My Song: A Memoir

Harry Belafonte, Michael Shnayerson · 480 pages

The popular singer and former UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador shares the story of his life and career, from his impoverished childhood in Harlem and Jamaica and his racial barrier-breaking career to his commitment to numerous civil causes.

Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington · 192 pages

Booker T. Washington, the most recognized national leader, orator and educator, emerged from slavery in the deep south, to work for the betterment of African Americans in the post Reconstruction period. "Up From Slavery" is an autobiography of Booker T. Washington's life and work, which has been the source of inspiration for all Americans. Washington reveals his inner most thoughts as he transi

Colored People

Henry Louis Gates Jr. · 216 pages

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

George L. Jackson · 294 pages

From Library Journal Jackson gained notoriety shortly before his death in 1970 when his younger brother unsuccessfully tried to free him at gunpoint when Jackson and two others were on trial for killing a guard. Written between 1964 and 1970 while serving time in Soledad Prison for robbery, the letters reveal the brutality and racism faced by prisoners and call for unity among African Americans. T