Black studies Biography

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with edge wear, short closed tears. The first full-length biography--and likely the authoritative one for years to come--of the flamboyant black congressman who, as civil-rights gadfly and as libertine, exemplified the gap between our nation's ideals and practices that was given a name in Gunnar Myrdal's ``American Dilemma.'' Blessed with good looks, eloquence, and a bully pulpit (he succeeded his father as head of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the nation's largest black congregation), Powell became ``Mr. Civil Rights'' in the pre-King era by combining agitation and electoral politics. As congressman from Harlem, Powell denounced racist southern colleagues and introduced the ``Powell Amendment'' to deny federal funds to projects or organizations that practiced discrimination. In 1960, he became chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, then the strongest position ever held by a black in the US government. Columbia Univ. political-science professor Hamilton also highlights how the Democratic politician became a thorn in the side of ally and foe alike. Powell was a maverick seldom bound by party (he endorsed Eisenhower for President), duty (a high absentee rate), or conventional morality. Inevitably, after an income-tax evasion trial, a suit filed by a Harlem resident he called a ``bag woman,'' and a European junket with two attractive female aides, Powell was stripped of his chairmanship by the House of Representatives despite his cry of double standards for white counterparts. Blending scholarship and ironic detachment, an admirably balanced treatment of a politician who provoked anything but objectivity during his Marion Barry-like career.

Softcover. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2nd pr., 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 266 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY KELLEY on the title page. Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813-1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and collaborator of the state's abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens's household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries. In the last years of Stevens's life, as his declining health threatened to short-circuit his work, Smith risked her own well-being to keep him alive while he led the drive to end slavery, impeach Andrew Johnson, and push for the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Bantam Books, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 414 pages, b&w photos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 216 pages. Hardcover with price-clipped dust jacket. Dust jacket shows chipping, and wear on edges. Covered with plastic sleeve. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf,otherwise clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press, reprint, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 207 pages, b&w illustrations. Few of rodeo's early heroes matched the achievements of the black cowboy Bill Pickett, and his story is recounted here for the first time in book form. Pickett grew up in Texas in the 1880s, the child of former slaves, to become nationally famous as the star of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. Pickett was associated with such western figures as Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Milt Hinkle, and Lucille Mulhall, and earned a reputation as an all around cowboy of legendary abilities. His greatest claim to fame is as the originator of steer wrestling, the only rodeo event to the traced to one individual. Audiences all over the United States, South America, Canada, and England were amazed to see the "Dusky Demon" fell on thousand-pound steers and bring them down bite-'em style with his teeth. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Columbia, SC, State Company, 2nd, 1922, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 345 pages. Hardcover with black stamped lettering on front. Rear top corner bumped. Light foxing on page block and internal pages. Light fading on edges of cover.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 237 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Memoir of an African-American woman when she was a student at a formerly all white male private prep school.

Hardcover. US, Atlas & Co, 6th, 2008, 240 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2nd pr., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Blending biography and social history, this portrait of one of the first Black Americans to win fame and respect in the twentieth century draws on new interview material and translations from German press coverage. 330 pages, b&w illustrations.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "invigorate" the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America's race problems. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. Philippa grew up under the adoring andinquisitive eyes of an entire nation and soon became the role model and inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the "little Harlem genius." Suffering the double sting of racismand gender bias, Philippa had been rejected by the elite classical music milieu in the United States and forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a world-class performer and composer. She traveled throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia performing for kings, queens, and presidents. By then Philippa had added a second career as an author and foreign correspondent reporting on events around the globe--from Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lamberene to the turbulent Asian theater of the 1960s. She would give a command performance for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium one day, and hide from the Viet Cong among the ancient graves of the Annam kings another.

Softcover. Urbana IL, University of Illinois Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 295 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY BECK on the title page. A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life. In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 768 pages. One of the most influential singers and songwriters of all time, Sam Cooke was among the first to blend gospel music and secular themes--the early foundation of soul music. He was the opposite of Elvis: a black performer who appealed to white audiences, who wrote his own songs, who controlled his own business destiny. No biography has previously been written that fully captures Sam Cooke's accomplishments, the importance of his contribution to American music, the drama that accompanied his rise in the early days of the civil rights movement, and the mystery that surrounds his death. Bestselling author Peter Guralnick tells this moving and significant story, from Cooke's childhood as a choirboy to an adulthood when he was anything but. With appearances by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin, Fidel Castro, The Beatles, Sonny and Cher, Bob Dylan, and other central figures of this explosive era, DREAM BOOGIE is a compelling depiction of one man striving to achieve his vision despite all obstacles--and an epic portrait of America during the turbulent and hopeful 1950s and 1960s. The triumph of the book is the vividness with which Peter Guralnick conveys the astonishing richness of the black America of this era--the drama, force, and feeling of the story.

Hardcover. Jefferson NC, McFarland, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 223 pages, b&w photos. Eugene Jackson became a child star in 1924 playing "Pineapple" in the original "Our Gang" comedy shorts. Join him as he shares his life story -- a story that preserves the history of vaudeville and early Hollywood as well as chronicles the African American experience in the entertainment business.

Hardcover. NY, STEWART TABORI CHANG, 1ST, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 378 pages. Here is a musical history told in legends, facts, and rumors every bit as colorful as the images that illustrate the book. The story is filled with characters such as O.V. Wright, a singer deemed "too ugly to tour"; Frnakie Lymon, who received a hot dog as full payment for some of the greatest R&B songs of all time; LaVern Baker, a.k.a. "Little Miss Sharecropper"; Bille Holiday shooting dice with the boys on the bus; Solomon Burke, R&B immortal and Doctor of Mortuary Sciences; soul ghoul Screamin' Jay Hawkins locked in his coffin by the Drifters; and many otehr talented and unique entertainers. Illustrated with more than 400 original photographs, publicity shots, posters, programs, advertisements, program covers, magazine covers, album covers and sleeves, sheet music, and record labels in full color, this is a story of hot music and high style, of people who made history by being themselves and made the world a richer, wilder and definitely cooler place for the rest of us.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 254, b&w illustrations. A veteran of seven decades of professional baseball reminisces about his days in the Negro Leagues, offers an intimate portrait of Satchel Paige, and reveals his current work scouting for the Kansas City Royals at age eighty-two. Buck O'Neil was a former all-star player and manager for the Kansas City Monarchs; he also has the distinction of being the first black to hold a coaching position in major league baseball. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 192 pages. Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. Black jockeys were internationally famous - the first African American superstar athletes--and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy's troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston/NY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Boston Globe reporter Haygood ( Two on the River ) weaves together interviews and research to create a nuanced yet vivid narrative about the crusading Harlem congressman who served in the House for 24 years and whose controversial behavior and womanizing often overshadowed his crucial contribution to the War on Poverty. Haygood astutely traces how the light-skinned Powell (1908-1972), who tried to pass as white when a Colgate student, later embraced his blackness and demanded acceptance in the white world. Mixing New York and national political history with Powell's rise as a Baptist minister and politician, Haygood adds deft cameos of characters like Hattie Dodson, Powell's devoted secretary, and Hazel Scott, the jazz star whose wedding to the divorced congressman was "the stuff of grand romance and intrigue." Expelled from Congress in 1966 for alleged misappropriations and an unpaid libel judgment, Powell, Haygood writes poignantly, was shunned by black leaders and, even after reinstatement by the Supreme Court, disparaged by many he had helped. Though less authoritative in assessing Powell's political milieu than Charles V. Hamilton's 1991 book, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma , this is a richer portrait of Powell the man. Clean copy.

Softcover. Authors Choice Press, reprint, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, b&w illustrations, 216 pages. Originally published in 1973 and covers the early and essential years of her life and career. The story of a shy girl from Mississippi who became a world opra star told in a sympathetic light.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 72 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to edges. Black and white illustrations throughout by Mezzo. From 'Crossroads Blues' to 'Sweet Home Chicago', 'Hellhound on My Trail' to 'Come On In My Kitchen', Robert Johnson wrote some of the most enduring and formative songs of the original blues era, songs that would go on to help shape the birth of rock 'n' roll in the 1960s. Beloved of Clapton, Dylan and the Stones, Robert Johnson remains one of the most iconic and mythologized figures in popular music (and the first of many to die at the age of 27). Born in the in the South in Mississippi, Johnson made his way to the urban North as a traveling musician, but it was only when he returned to the South that he recorded the twenty-nine songs, in two sessions, which would create his legacy. Exploring the stories and legends that surround his life and death -- his childhood, his womanizing, his pact with the devil at the crossroads -- Mezzo and DuPont have produced a fittingly creative and beautiful depiction of this most extraordinary life.

NY, Viking, 4th pr., 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 594 pages, b&w illustrations. Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination.

Softcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pbk proof, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 420 pages. Publishers uncorrected proof with flyer promoting the title laid in. The first major biography of the great jazz pianist and singer, written with the full cooperation of his family. When he died in 1965, at age forty-five, Nat King Cole was already a musical legend. As famous as Frank Sinatra, he had sold more records than anyone but Bing Crosby. Written with the narrative pacing of a novel, this absorbing biography traces Cole's rise to fame, from boy-wonder jazz genius to megastar in a racist society. Daniel Mark Epstein brings Cole and his times to vivid life: his precocious entrance onto the vibrant jazz scene of his hometown, Chicago; the creation of his trio and their rise to fame; the crossover success of such songs as "Straighten Up and Fly Right"; and his years as a pop singer and television star, the first African American to have his own show.Epstein examines Cole's insistence on changing society through his art rather than political activism, the romantic love story of Cole and Maria Ellington, and Cole's famous and influential image of calm, poise, and elegance, which concealed the personal turmoil and anxiety that undermined his health.

Hardcover. New York, Harper & Row, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 217 pages. Hardcover with price-clipped dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Scarce biography of Robeson by Hamilton, a noted African-American children's book author.

NY, Knopf, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Passionate and enormously talented, Paul Robeson lived one of the great lives of the twentieth century. Martin Duberman's classic biography is a monumental and powerfully affecting portrait of one of this century's most notable performers, political radicals, and champions of racial equality. Drawing on a vast archive of family papers and interviews with friends and relatives as well as FBI files, Paul Robeson charts the heroic and tragic course of Robeson's life: from his early days as the son of a former slave to his rise to unprecedented international acclaim as a stage actor and singer, and from his political awakening to his downfall as a victim of McCarthyism and the efforts of the U.S. government to destroy him. Clean copy.