Former Black Panther information minister Eldridge Cleaver was a complex man who inspired profound adulation, love, rage, and, among many, fear. Target Zero brings Cleaver's controversial story into focus through his own words. This books charts Cleaver's life through his writings: his quiet childhood, his youth spent in prison, his startling emergence as a Black Panther leader who became a "fugitive from justice" by the end of 1968, his seven-year exile, and his religious and pol...

It's the birth year of Ragtime music, 1895, and Lee "Stagolee" Shelton, a St. Louis pimp, murders Billy Lyons, a political gang member. Afterwards, Stagolee makes a deal with Judge Murphy to bring order to the underworld. As a member of a group of pimps called the "Stags," Stagolee makes alliances with the Democratic Party and votes for a Democratic Mayor. Later, the Stag Party, along with the Democratic Party, elects St. Louis's first black policeman. It is this policeman who is sent to a...

***WINNER, 2008 PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles National Literary AwardBlacks have been vanishing from college campuses in the United States and reappearing in prisons, videos, and movies. Cecil Brown tackles this unwitting "disappearing act" head on, paying special attention to the situation at UC Berkeley and the University of California system generally. Brown contends that educators have ignored the importance of the oral tradition in African American upbringing, an oversight mir...

They were the Sheridan men, ruled by passion, betrayed by love, heirs to a legacy of violence and forbidden desire. Gus, Boston's top homicide cop: he knew equally well the backroom politics of City Hall and the private passions of the very rich, a man haunted by the wanton courage and perilous obsessions he inherited from his father... Conn, the patriarch, a lawless cop who spawned a circle of vengeance and betrayal that would span half a century... and Chris, Gus's beloved son, a Harvard...

The New York Times BestsellerWinner of the Texas Institute of Letters's Carr P. Collins AwardOne of Book Riot's Best Books of the YearIn nineteenth-century Austin, Texas, a ruthless murderer terrorized the city in what would soon become a story more shocking than any fiction.In the late 1800s, just as Austin was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a ...

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • This suspenseful novel portrays a community--and a family--under siege, during the shocking string of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s.Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicl...

“By telling the little-known stories of six pioneering African American entrepreneurs, Black Fortunes makes a worthy contribution to black history, to business history, and to American history.”—Margot Lee Shetterly, New York Times Bestselling author of Hidden FiguresBetween the years of 1830 and 1927, as the last generation of blacks born into slavery was reaching maturity, a small group of industrious, tenacious, and daring men and wome...

"To know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it's bad for them. They thinks we want what they got . . . . That's why they don't want us reading." -- Nightjohn"I didn't know what letters was, not what they meant, but I thought it might be something I wanted to know. To learn."--SarnySarny, a female slave at the Waller plantation, first sees Nightjohn when he is brought there with a rope around his neck, his body covere...

Acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, composer, novelist, and memoirist, Gordon Parks has participated in, been witness to, and documented many of the major events in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.In A Hungry Heart, Parks reflects on the people and events that shaped him: from growing up poor on the Kansas prairie to crisscrossing the country on the North Coast Limited; documenting poverty and injustice in Chicago to doing fashion spreads for

An ex-cop's habits die hard....Savvy, streetwise former cop Mali Anderson left the NYPD with a lawsuit and a lot of bitterness. Now she's on her way to a master's in sociology, living with her jazz musician father and mothering her orphaned nephew, Alvin. As Mali walks past the stylish town houses of Harlem's Strivers Row to meet Alvin at his rehearsal with the Uptown Children's Chorus, she hears a child's panicked screams--and witnesses a struggle. Mali thwarts the child's abducti...

Here is one of those rare and remarkable debuts that herald the appearance of a major new talent on the literary scene. Inspired by real events, Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands is a wise and luminous story about a northern family, a southern town, and the senseless murder that sparks an extraordinary act of courage.To this day, my family is in disagreement as to precisely when the nightmare began. For me, it was the morning Daddy and Luther discovered Marvin...

"Billy the Kid" by Deborah O'Toole is an essay about William Henry McCarty (aka William Antrim, William H. Bonney, Billy the Kid), including information about the Kid's early life, his later cohorts (Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre and Jose Chavez y Chavez), the Kid's death and burial, resources, related films and links for further study.