How did famous New Orleans jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong get his first horn? Seven-year-old Louis Armstrong was too poor to buy a real instrument. He didn't even go to school. To help his mother pay the rent, every day he rode a junk wagon through the streets of New Orleans, playing a tin horn and collecting stuff people didn't want. Then one day, the junk wagon passed a pawn shop with a gleaming brass trumpet in the window. . . . With messages...

"The ultimate book for both the dabbler and serious scholar. -- [Hughes] is sumptuous and sharp, playful and sparse, grounded in an earthy music -- This book is a glorious revelation."--Boston Globe Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest...

"Using original slave auction and plantation estate documents, contrasts the monetary value of a slave with the priceless value of life experiences and dreams that a slave owner could never take away"--

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots penned this sweeping saga, also an upcoming television miniseries, that focuses on the family of matriarch Mama Flora, an African-American woman whose husband dies at the hands of white landowners. 150,000 first printing.

""Daddy always said it takes a man of peace to stop a war." Based on the true story of Paul Robeson's visit to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, comes this recollection of his bravery and activism by his granddaughter, Susan Robeson, with her debut book. When Susan was a child her father and grandfather told her family stories over and over. Grandpa Paul was a great man, a singer with a deep and rumbling voice, a man of peace and principle...

As an elderly woman, Lillian recalls that her great-great-grandparents were sold as slaves in front of a courthouse where only rich white men were allowed to vote, then the long fight that led to her right--and determination--to cast her ballot since theVoting Rights Act gave every American the right to vote.

Keena Ford chronicles her many mishaps as she begins second grade.

Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribute to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Smith interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today.

After her father dies within hours of being married to a white woman, a ten-year-old black girl learns with her new mother to overcome grief and to adjust to a new place in their rural black South Carolina community.