June Jubilee: Featured Titles for Adults

Reflecting on African American life, culture and contributions, which are currently confronted by modern racism and violence, Imani Perry writes a letter of exultation and caution to her two sons. Generous in scope and thought, her words speak to all of us, no matter who we are, to do and be better.

During and after World War II among the female human computers, who were subsumed within aeronautics, there was another group of female human computers who were submerged because they were African Americans. This book recounts the lives of some of those African American women who worked as calculators, and then as mathematicians and engineers for NASA and its precursors. This is their story, at long last revealed, as the author shines a light on the stellar work of a group of African American women, whose contributions were not fully known by enough people.

 

 

Considered by none other than Toni Morrison to be “required reading,” Coates' collection of essays delves into what it means to be black in American society. Intimate and personal, yet far-reaching in its criticisms, this book’s unflinching honesty takes the status quo to task. Coates examines race and racism in America, both past and present, through the lens of his own full-life experience, in this open letter to his son.

 Margo Jefferson shares her autobiographical account of growing up within a unique niche of society: the Black elite of upper-crust Chicago.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wilkerson examines the migration of nearly 6 million African Americans from the South for the North and the West between World War I and the 1970s through the stories of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who left rural Mississippi for Chicago in the 1930s; George Swanson Starling, who set out for Harlem in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who became a Los Angeles physician after leaving Louisiana in the 1950s.

This is the full harrowing, first-person narrative of one man's capture, enslavement, life as a slave and his life after emancipation. Zora Neale Hurston transcribed Kossula's remembrances in the original vernacular, as he recounted his experiences as a 19-year-old, in 1860, and how he was captured, tortured, chained, put on a slave ship and taken to a strange place. The date of his capture is important because it is a reminder that even the 1808 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves did nothing to stop the insidious practice of importing slaves to the United States.

By looking at the life, struggles and work of James Baldwin, Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., reminds us that the fight for equitable change is always with us. Baldwin's brilliant insights are matched by Glaude's brilliant ability to bring new light to old problems, and that complacency and weariness are not acceptable.

Susan Burton's life took a dive into hell when her five-year-old son was killed by a van driving down her street. She began self-medicating, taking increasingly stronger illegal drugs, and for over fifteen years Burton was in and out of prison. By chance she found a private drug rehab facility and turned her life around. Through her organization, A New Way of Life, Ms. Burton is now an advocate for formerly incarcerated women.

Among the many “firsts” in the life of Constance Baker Motley, she was the first Black woman appointed as a federal judge and the first Black woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Throughout her life, she fought for equality and justice for all and knew that inequality of any type was a barrier to freedom of expression

With the goal of becoming a lawyer, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford was selected as one of nine black students to integrate the all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957.  On the first day of classes the eight other students were advised to arrive at school as a group escorted by local ministers, but without a telephone Elizabeth never received word about this plan.  As she stoically approached the campus by herself, she was mobbed by adult segregationists who hurled the most hateful and violent racial epithets at her.  An iconic photograph captured white student Hazel Bryan, also fifteen, spewing venom at Elizabeth.  Years later Hazel contacted Elizabeth to apologize, and for a time, the two women formed a friendship.