african american families

"In 1854 in Eastern Maryland twelve-year-old Ann is a slave, grateful that her family is still all together; but when their master, in need of money, decides to sell Ann andher younger brother, their parents decide to take the dangerous step of running away north to freedom--a journey filled with danger, especially since they are not sure how to find the first station on the Underground Railroad"--OCLC.

"Mitchell explores the Portland of his childhood, tracing the ways in which his family managed their lives in and around drugs, prostitution, gangs, and imprisonment as members of a tiny black population in one of the country's whitest cities. He discusses sex work and serial killers, gangs and guns, near-death experiences, composite fathers, the concept of 'hustle,' and the destructive power of drugs and addiction on family. In examining the conflicts within his family and community, Jackson presents a microcosm of struggle and survival in contemporary urban America--an exploration of the forces that shaped his life, his city, and the lives of so many black men like him"--OCLC.

The Turner house on Yarrow Street in Detroit has stood for fifty years and has seen over a dozen children born and raised, grandchildren visit, the fall of the neighborhood, and the loss of the family patriarch. When the Turner family matriarch falls ill and loses her independence, the adult Turner children return to the house to decide its fate.

"Sarah M. Broom's [memoir] 'The Yellow House' tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina"--Provided by publisher.

"Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world.

When eleven-year-old Iris sneaks out at night to make snow angels, she was not expecting to raise the ghost of Avery Moore, a girl her own age; but bringing to light the segregated and abandoned black cemetery seems like the perfect way to help Avery get the recognition she craves, and it will also be a good idea for the school project about the history of her small North Carolina town, where racial tensions are never far from the surface--only it seems that if Avery gets everything she wants Iris will join her as a ghost, best friends forever.

After the death of Grandma June, Giovanna, Keyah, and Fatima are shocked to learn she has left them each a sizable inheritence, but in order to claim their riches, each of her granddaughters must first marry their children's fathers.

As Marilyn approaches middle-age, she struggles to discover herself outside of a passionless marriage, a demanding family and an ever-growing list of dreams deferred. With three children in college, a demanding mother-in-law, a senile mother and a drug-addicted sister, Marilyn has more on her plate than she expected at this stage of the game.

Sapphire, having inherited the qualities of perseverance and strength from her mother, a woman forced into slavery in 1749, passes on those traits to successive generations of African-American women as they struggle to triumph over rape, humiliation, poverty, and scandal.