"Explores the life of Jesse Owens, including his childhood and family, his rise to excellence in track and field, his 1936 Olympic triumph, and his death and legacy"--Provided by publisher.

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...

"In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer delivered a heart-wrenching testimony before the Democratic National Convention's (DNC) Credentials Committee. In this speech, Hamer represented both the concerns of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and the limits of American democracy when she proclaimed: 'I question America. Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be...

The poetry of Langston Hughes pulses with the rhythms of jazz and blues, and the language of the streets. In describing the everyday lives of African Americans, he became the leading African-American poet of the world. Jodie A. Shull s insightful and highly readable new biography sheds light on one of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance and introduces another generation to his extraordinary outpouring of poetry, short stories, novels,...

Raised in rural Alabama, Rosa Parks had never known a time when racial segregation was not the law. Then, one day, Parks decided that she had endured enough. Her soft-spoken defiance on a city bus was the spark-and civil rights activism, led by the young Martin Luther King, Jr., was the fire. The Montgomery bus boycott thrust parks into the spotlight, but it is only one part of her story.

"In the first biography of Martin Luther King to look at his life through the prism of his evolving faith, distinguished historian Paul Harvey examines Martin Luther King's life through his complex, emerging, religious lives. Harvey's concise biography will allow readers to see King anew in the context of his time and today"--

Examines the life of Booker T. Washington, a slave freed after the Civil War who became a leading educator of African Americans and whose Tuskegee Institute taught farming, carpentry, sewing, and other skills.