Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition
written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass during his
time in Lynn, Massachusetts. It is generally held to be the most famous
of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same
period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and
is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to
fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United
States.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass encompasses
eleven chapters that recount Douglass's life as a slave and his ambition
to become a free man.
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The Audacity of Hope
is Barack Obama's call for a new kind of politics—a politics that
builds upon those shared understandings that pull us together as
Americans. Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world,
refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate,
Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust
in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best
hope going forward.
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Solomon Northup is a
free black man living in upstate New York with his family in the 1840s.
He is a carpenter and a talented violin player. One day, two men
approach him and ask if he will accompany them and play his fiddle as
they travel to Washington DC to the circus they work for. Solomon
agrees. Unfortunately, he is drugged and wakes up in what he discovers
is a slave pen within view of the Capitol.
Burch, a cruel slave
trader, beats Solomon and tells him never to mention that he is from the
North and that he was kidnapped. Solomon is cowed into submission but
is inconsolable about his new situation. He and several other slaves are
taken down South to Louisiana to be sold. Solomon witnessed firsthand
the horror of a slave mother being separated from her children.
He
is sold to William Ford, a kindly minister with a small plantation in
the Great Pine Woods. Ford treats Solomon and his other slaves well.
Solomon is not beaten, has a decent degree of freedom, and distinguishes
himself as a hard worker. However, a local carpenter who works for
Ford, Tibeats, takes an immediate dislike to Solomon. He is an
irascible, coarse, and cruel man, and it is to Solomon’s great despair
that Ford’s pecuniary troubles lead him to sell Solomon (but with a
mortgage) to Tibeats.
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William Edward Burghardt
Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American
intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose
astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to
the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk,
Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal
masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.
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Blame me on history is
the autobiography of William Bloke Modisane. He was one of a team of
black writers of the 1950s who created Drum magazine and who also became
an actor and playwright. His story was originally published in 1963,
but was banned in South Africa during the 'struggle' years. He lived in
Sophiatown, Johannesburg until 1958 when the township was bulldozed flat
by government order. Consequently, Modisane decided that the time had
come to leave the country and settled in West Germany. But he always
felt very much an exile. His evocative writing transports the reader
back in time to experience the life and shebeen culture that existed at
that time in Johannesburg and particularly in Sophiatown. As one of the
first urban black intellectuals Modisane became host to such people as
Dame Sybil Thorndike and Adlai Stevenson, as well as to many South
African whites who wanted to know and understand the culture of
shantytown life and the problems of the urban blacks living there. Blame
Me on History takes us back to those days and gives us some insight
into the vitality and the vibrant energy that was Sophiatown.
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"Told in gutsy
language...her story is an encouraging and enjoyable one for any member
of the human race." — N.Y. Review of Books.
First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road
is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, funny, bold and poignant autobiography,
an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty
in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and
intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her acclaimed
fiction, Hurston's very personal literary self-portrait offers a
revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life–public and private–of
an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the
black experience in America. Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud,
spirited woman who started off low and climbed hight, Dust Tracks on a Road is a rare treasure from one of literature's most cherished voices.
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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 transitions from ex-slave to teacher and
founder of one of the most important schools for African Americans in
the south, The Tuskegee Industrial Institute.
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The now-classic memoir
that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at
the civil rights movement and the black experience.
By turns
shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs
of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American
history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that
I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I
have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this
now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.
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