african americans

Offers insight into the lives of ten influential African American men from different times in the history of the United States.

Presents the poem of Langston Hughes in which highlights the courage and dignity of the African American Pullman porters in the early twentieth century.

A biography of Earvin "Magic" Johnson, discussing his basketball career, his diagnosis with HIV, and his post-basketball success as a businessman and advocate for impoverished communities and young people.

Presents a collection of poems by African-American poets, including Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Alexander.

Imagines the childhood and youth of "Prosser's Gabriel", a courageous and intelligent blacksmith in post-Revolutionary Richmond, Virginia, who roused thousands of African American slaves, like himself, to rebel.

In 1945, thirteen-year-old Levi is sent to find the father he has not seen in three years, going from Chicago, to segregated North Carolina, and finally to Pendleton, Oregon,where he learns that his father's unit, the all-Black 555th paratrooper battalion, will never see combat but finally has a mission. Includes historical notes.

The author, a Rhodes scholar and combat veteran, analyzes factors that influenced him as well as another man of the name and from the same neighborhood who was drawn into a life of drugs and crime and ended up serving life in prison, focusing on the influence of relatives, mentors, and social expectations that could have led either of them on different paths.

Autumn, who struggles with a learning disability and exceeds at wrestling, and Adonis, who is confined to a wheelchair and loves books, learn how their weaknesses can become assets.

"Read about Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Jay Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove"--Provided by publisher.

Since losing both of her parents, fifteen-year-old Katie can see and talk to ghosts, which makes her a loner until fellow student Law sees her drawing of a historic house and together they seek a treasure rumored to be hidden there by illegal slave-traders.