African American Womens History

Despite gold medals, WNBA championships, and a list of accolades, A’ja Wilson knows how it feels to be swept under the rug—to not be heard, to not feel seen, to not be taken seriously. As a fourth grader going to a primarily white school in South Carolina, A’ja was told she’d have to stay outside for a classmate’s birthday party. Wilson tells stories like this, about how even when life tried to hold her down, it didn’t stop her. She shares her contribution to “The Talk,” and how to keep fighting, all while igniting strength, passion, and joy.

Trapped in the clutches of a Zombie apocalypse, the City of Chicago, the murder capital of the U.S., unleashes the ultimate weapon, capitalism, by paying $1,000 for every Re-Killed Zombie brought to city hall, ushering in "The Great Zombie Gold Rush". Zombies never have a chance in a world where people realize 75 Zombies pays off their student loans, 40 Zombies buys them a Tesla, 5 Zombies wipes out their Visa debt...

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets and astronauts into space. Among these problem solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation.

1950. In a shack in the Georgia backwoods two siblings, Hannah Mae and Jerry, find themselves suddenly orphaned. The swift and unexpected death of their mother casts a long shadow of foster care, threatening to tear them apart. But fierce and resolute, Hannah Mae vows to keep the system from swallowing them whole. In a desperate bid for freedom, they hit the dusty roads, aiming for the sultry embrace of Mississippi and an obscure auntie, a phantom relative who exists only as a whisper in their memories and a faded photograph in their father’s old Bible. She is their only hope, their ...

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.

In this classic work—a blend of memoir, social criticism, and political analysis that remains relevant today—the first Black Congresswoman to serve in American history, New York’s dynamic representative Shirley Chisholm, traces her extensive political struggle and examines the problems that have long plagued the American system of government.

In this incredible narrative, Erica Armstrong Dunbar reveals a fascinating and heartbreaking behind-the-scenes look at the Washingtons when they were the First Family and an in-depth look at their slave, Ona Judge, who dared to escape from one of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Born into a life of slavery, Ona Judge eventually grew up to be George and Martha Washington’s “favored” dower slave. When she was told she was going to be given as a wedding gift to Martha Washington’s granddaughter, Ona made the bold and brave decision to flee to the North, where she'd be a fugitive.

During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house” where “no one left alive.”

This edition of Margot Lee Shetterly’s acclaimed book is perfect for young students. It's the powerful story of four African-American female mathematicians at NASA who helped achieve some of the greatest moments in our space program. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Celebrated for her courageous exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of 19th-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman?

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She cofounded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement. This engaging memoir relates Wells’ private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

According to the 2010 US census, more than 70 percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north.

At age four, Phyllis Biffle Elmore was plucked off her front porch in Detroit and dropped on her grandmother Lula Horn's doorstep in rural Alabama. Phyllis felt utterly abandoned until Grandma Lula showed her both all-encompassing love and her intricate "Quilts of Souls." Phyllis listened intently as Lula told epic stories of folks who had passed on as she turned their clothing into breathtaking quilts for their families.

The life story of Coretta Scott King - wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular 20th-century American civil rights activist - as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends. Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising Black parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose.

Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?” It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.

In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.

In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.

Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives - but not everyone regularly sees themselves on the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all - regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability - have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature.

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know.

Harriet Ann Jacob's autobiography documents her life as a slave and how she attained freedom for herself and her children. Harrowing in its descriptions of sexual abuse, Jacob's slave narrative is notable for the appeal it made to abolitionist women to open their eyes to the realities of slavery. Deemed too shocking for reading audiences at the time, the book was shelved before it was published in 1861 near the start of the Civil War.