Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Bethany House (November 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0764228870

*Starred Review*
Foster drops back to 1838 to tell the story of black Cherokees forced along the Trail of Tears. Her young heroine, Armentia, lives an idyllic life in North Carolina, but greedy whites scheme for the land and bring about the loathsome Indian Removal Act. Armentia watches as her brother is dragged into slavery, and then as most of her tribe, the Deer Clan, dies on the trail. Nor does Oklahoma turn out to be paradise, with Cherokees preying on Cherokees and Armentia sold into slavery. This is simply told and moving, Foster's best work since her groundbreaking first novel, Passing by Samaria (2000).
-- John Mort, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Multnomah Books (December 31, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1576736156

Growing up in Mississippi, Alena had been sheltered by parents who didn't want her to know how cruel the post-World War I world was to black people. But finding the lynched body of her best friend J.C., who had just returned from the war in Europe, changes Alena and destroys her faith in God. A gifted writer, Alena wants to tell the world what happened, but her parents, knowing that she would be the next one hanging from a tree if she did, send her to live with an aunt in Chicago. As Alena struggles to comprehend how a loving God could let this nightmare happen, two men come into her life: one with the power to save her, the other with the power to destroy her. In this first novel, Foster's poetic telling is soft enough to capture and sharp enough to cut as she evokes the strength of faith needed to survive when all seems lost. This unique addition to the Christian fiction genre is highly recommended for all collections.
-- Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

by Sharon M. Draper

Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Simon Pulse (January 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1416953485

*Starred Review* Gr. 9-12. Best known for her contemporary African American characters, Draper's latest novel is a searing work of historical fiction that imagines a 15-year-old African girl's journey through American slavery. The story begins in Amari's Ashanti village, but the idyllic scene explodes in bloodshed when slavers arrive and murder her family. Amari and her beloved, Besa, are shackled, and so begins the account of impossible horrors from the slave fort, the Middle Passage, and auction on American shores, where a rice plantation owner buys Amari for his 16-year-old son's sexual enjoyment. In brutal specifics, Draper shows the inhumanity: Amari is systematically raped on the slave ship and on the plantation and a slave child is used as alligator bait by white teenagers. And she adds to the complex history in alternating chapters that flip between Amari and Polly, an indentured white servant on Amari's plantation. A few plot elements, such as Amari's chance meeting with Besa, are contrived. But Draper builds the explosive tension to the last chapter, and the sheer power of the story, balanced between the overwhelmingly brutal facts of slavery and Amari's ferocious survivor's spirit, will leave readers breathless, even as they consider the story's larger questions about the infinite costs of slavery and how to reconcile history. A moving author's note discusses the real places and events on which the story is based. Give this to teens who have read Julius Lester's Day of Tears (2005). Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

(American Girl Mysteries)

by Evelyn Coleman and Jean-Paul Tibbles

Reading level: Ages 9-12
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: American Girl Publishing Inc (February 20, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1593691629

In the winter of 1866, Addy's poppa gets a new job. His employer, Mr. Radisson, even offers the Walker family a home of their own on the grounds of his fine house in Society Hill. Addy's delight quickly evaporates as she realizes that Mr. Radisson's house holds frightening secrets--one of which leads straight back to the plantation where Addy's family was held in slavery only two years before. Girls will enjoy solving the mystery right along with Addy. This latest book from award-winning author Evelyn Coleman includes an illustrated "Looking Back" section to provide historical context.

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Publisher: Washington Square Press
ISBN: 0743410106

Fictitious story of the wife and mistress of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass's love life was nearly as tumultuous as his political career or so Rhodes (Voodoo Dreams; Magic City) posits in this vividly imagined recreation of the romantic triangle formed by the great abolitionist, his black wife and his white mistress. Anna Murray is Douglass's first love, a free Maryland woman of color who falls in love with the young slave and helps him escape the South. Douglass follows through by marrying Murray and moving her to New Bedford, Conn. Marital life begins blissfully enough, but soon Anna finds herself alone raising Douglass's children while he travels to promote the abolitionist cause. Douglass, meanwhile, meets his intellectual match in German beauty Ottilie Assing, and their relationship turns physical when they journey together to England. Anna learns of the affair shortly after their return, but once her temper cools she tolerates Assing's presence, even allowing Douglass to include her in the living arrangements when the family moves to Rochester. The narrative clips along as Rhodes introduces the various romantic angles, but as a character study the book has some noticeable flaws. The uneducated but feisty Anna emerges as a well-drawn, multifaceted character, and Assing is effectively portrayed as she tries to balance her love for Douglass with her desire to be known as something more than the obscure mistress of a powerful, charismatic figure.

by Edward P. Jones

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
ISBN: 0061159174

The Known World -- Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

by Hannah Crafts
ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446690295

Amazon.com Review: Few events are more thrilling than the discovery of a buried treasure. Some years ago, when scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. was leafing through an auction catalog, he noticed a listing for an unpublished, clothbound manuscript thought to date from the 1850s: "The Bondwoman's Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, Recently Escaped from North Carolina." Gates realized that, if genuine, this would be the first novel known to have been written by a black woman in America, as well as the only one by a fugitive slave. He bought the manuscript (there was no competing bid) and began the exhilarating task of confirming the racial identity of the author and the approximate date of composition (circa 1855-59). Gates's excited descriptions of his detective work in the introduction to The Bondwoman's Narrative will make you want to find promising old manuscripts of your own. He also proposes a couple candidates for authorship, assuming that Hannah Crafts was the real or assumed name of the author, and not solely a pen name.

If Gates is right (his introduction and appendix should convince just about everyone), The Bondwoman's Narrative is a tremendous discovery. But is it a lost masterpiece? No. The novel draws so heavily on the conventions of mid-19th-century fiction--by turns religious, gothic, and sentimental--that it does not have much flavor of its own. The beginning of chapter 13 is a close paraphrase (virtually a cribbing) of the opening of Dickens's Bleak House. This borrowing seems to have escaped Gates, although he does quote the assessment of one scholar, the librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley, who had owned the manuscript before he acquired it, that "the best of the writer's mind was religious and emotional and in her handling of plot the long arm of coincidence is nowhere spared." Although not a striking literary contribution, The Bondwoman's Narrative is well worth reading on historical grounds, especially since it was never published. As Gates argues, these pages provide our first "unedited, unaffected, unglossed, unaided" glimpse into the mind of a fugitive slave. --Regina Marler 

by Daniel Black

Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 0312359713

The Sacred Place - While spending the summer of 1955 with relatives in Money, Miss., 14-year-old Chicago-raised Clement unleashes hell when he buys a root beer at the general store and refuses to place the nickel in the white female cashier's hand, leaving it instead on the counter. Though his sharecropping grandparents and aunt and uncle try desperately to protect him—his grandfather shoots and kills the men who come looking for the boy—Clement is abducted and his death is inevitable. Patriarch Jeremiah Johnson's pain and anger bring him to call a town meeting, and the town's blacks decide to stand up against generations of murders, lynchings, rapes and other violence. Unfortunately, Black (They Tell Me of a Home) stocks his novel with stereotypes—from the downtrodden blacks to the dumb, bigoted rednecks—who speak in phonetically rendered dialogue ("What we gon do?"). The clumsy, heavy dose of Christianity and rudimentary portrayal of racism will also limit appeal. 

by Ernest J. Gaines

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0385342780

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, published in 1971, was reprinted in 1992. "This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this woman, Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound And The Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has 'endured,' has seen almost everything and foretold the rest. Gaines' novel brings to mind other great works The Odyssey for the way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story in it all." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek 

Freedom Train

by Evelyn Coleman and David Riley

Reading level: Ages 9-12
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry (January 8, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0689847165

Clyde Thomason is proud to have an older brother who guards the Freedom Train. It's 1947, and the train is traveling to all forty-eight states, carrying important documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Clyde is lucky that the train is stopping in Atlanta. In the segregated South the train will only stop at cities that agree to integrate the crowds lining up to glimpse its famous contents.

Clyde has been chosen to recite the Freedom Pledge, but he's afraid that he'll chicken out. It doesn't help that he's the favorite target of the class bully. When the bully tries to beat him up, Clyde is shocked that an African-American boy, William, comes to his rescue. He's even more shocked that William's family lives in the rich -- and white -- part of town. But why is he so surprised? And why can't he be open about his friendship with William? When William's family is threatened, Clyde must make a choice: Will he have the courage to speak out to protect William's freedom?

Evelyn Coleman paints a touching, often humorous picture of the 1940s South. Based on the real journey of the Freedom Train, this is the inspirational story of a young boy's awakening to the injustices around him -- and to the idea that things could change.

Yet with a Steady Beat: The Black Church Through a Psychological and Biblical Lens

Paperback: 152 pages
Publisher: Lift Every Voice (February 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0802480926

"A faith in the God of the Bible and an association with the institutional church have had a positive influence on the African American community, and were key in the survival of the slave experience in America," says psychologist and professor Dr. Lee June. This book traces the history of Christianity among African Americans and the development of the "Black Church"-those denominations created by, created for, and stewarded by African Americans. He examines the role the church has played politically and psychologically as well as spiritually in the lives of African Americans. This comprehensive psychological and spiritual look at an historic institution will be a valuable tool for both pastors and seminary professors.

Celeste's Harlem Renaissance

Reading level: Ages 9-12
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown Young Readers; Reprint edition (January 1, 2009)
ISBN-10: 031611362X

From Booklist
After her mother dies and her father falls ill, 13-year-old Celeste is sent to her aunt Valentina, a singer and dancer in Harlem. Leaving Raleigh, North Carolina, is hard, and once in New York City, she is upset to learn that her aunt isn't a famous performer after all. Barely scraping by, Valentina asks Celeste to scrub floors for money. The Harlem Renaissance has begun, though, and Valentina introduces Celeste to the many legendary artists who congregate at the local cafe. Then Celeste is called back to North Carolina to help care for an elderly aunt, and she meets her challenges with the strength, realism, and courage she discovered during her stay in New York. Celeste's encounters with famous African Americans often feel contrived, but readers will connect with her strong, regional voice ("I felt lower than a snail's tail"), her ambitions, and the enormous responsibilities she confronts at such a young age. Both sobering and inspiring, Tate's novel is a moving portrait of growing up black and female in 1920s America. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

by Wendy Lawton

Reading level: Ages 9-12
Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Moody Publishers (January 1, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0802476392

In 1761 Phillis Wheatley was a little girl of seven or eight years old when she was captured in Gambia and brought to America as a slave. But she didn’t let her circumstances keep her down. She learned to read and write in English and Latin and showed a natural gift for poetry. By the time she was twelve, her elegy at the death of the great pastor George Whitefield brought her world-wide acclaim.

Phillis became known to heads of state, including George Washington himself, speaking out for American independence and the end of slavery. She became the first African American to publish a book, and her writings would eventually win her freedom. But more importantly, her poetry still proclaims Christ almost 250 years later.

Roots

Paperback: 899 pages
Publisher: Vanguard Press; Anv edition (May 22, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1593154496

Starred Review. It's hard to believe that it has been 30 years since Alex Haley's groundbreaking historical novel (based on his own family's history) was first published and became a worldwide phenomenon. Millions have read the story of the young African boy named Kunte Kinte, who in the late 1700s was kidnapped from his homeland and brought to the United States as a slave. Haley follows Kunte Kinte's family line over the next seven generations, creating a moving historical novel spanning 200 years. Avery Brooks proves to be the perfect choice to bring Haley's devastatingly powerful piece of American literature to audio. Brooks's rich, deep baritone brings a deliberate, dignified, at times almost reverential interpretation to his reading, but never so reserved as to forget that at its heart this is a story about people and family. His multiple characterizations manage, with a smooth and accomplished ease, to capture the true essence of each individual in the book. Michael Eric Dyson offers an informative introduction to Haley's book, but it is Brooks's performance that brings the author's words and history to life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Black Men Built the Capitol

Paperback: 899 pages
Publisher: Vanguard Press; Anv edition (May 22, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1593154496

Millions of people visit the National Mall, the White House, and the U.S.
Capitol each year. If they only hear the standard story, a big question remains:
“Where’s the black history?”

Packed with new information and archival photos, Black Men Built the Capitol answers this question. In this thoroughly researched yet completely accessible volume, Washington insider and political journalist Jesse J. Holland shines a light n the region’s African-American achievements, recounting little-known stories and verifying rumors, such as:

.Enslaved black men built the Capitol, White House, and other important Washington structures.
.Philip Reid, a thirty-nine-year-old slave from South Carolina, cast and helped save the model of the Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol Dome.
.The National Mall sits on the former site of the city’s most bustling slave market.
.The grounds that are now Arlington National Cemetery were, from 1863 to1888, a self-sustaining village for former slaves called the Freedman’s Village.

Included are hundreds of places in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia that illuminate “the rest of the story” for Washington residents and visitors alike.

Ida B. Wells, Let the Truth Be Told

Reading level: Ages 9-12
Hardcover: 40 pages
Publisher: Amistad (October 28, 2008)
ISBN-10: 006027705X

"An activist, educator, writer, journalist, suffragette, and pioneering voice against the horror of lynching, she used fierce determination and the power of the pen to educate the world about the unequal treatment of blacks in the United States. Award-winning author Walter Dean Myers tells the story of this legendary figure, which blends harmoniously with the historically detailed watercolor paintings of illustrator Bonnie Christensen. "

One Million Men and Me

Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Just Us Books, Inc.; 1st edition (September 15, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1933491078

On October 16, 1995, Black men of all ages, religions and backgrounds gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. They were there on a mission - to mobilize and motivate, as part of what would become the largest event of its kind in U.S. history: the Million Man March. The Million Man March was a movement like no other. It brought together Black men who were committed to inspiring and empowering themselves and each other to make positive and lasting changes in their families and communities. The March was widely covered by news media across the country and the world. Now, this new picture book shares the story of the March in a new light: through the eyes of a little girl who was with her father the day Black men made history.

(Caldecott Honor Book) (Hardcover)

Ms. Weatherford has so many, it's hard to choose. Here's a partial list:

Jesse Owens: Fastest Man Alive
Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane
Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins
Sink or Swim: African-American Lifesavers of the Outer Banks

http://www.caroleweatherford.com/books.htm

by Johnny Ray Moore and Amy Wummer

Reading level: Ages 4-8
Paperback: 26 pages
Publisher: Candy Cane Press; illustrated edition edition (February 2004)
ISBN-10: 0824954866

This title is suitable for ages 4 to 8 years. Beginning with King's childhood and following his life through his "I Have a Dream Speech" and subsequent death, this book reveals (in age-appropriate language) how King ended segregation in America and influenced the way we live our lives today.