The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than...

Lorraine Hansberry died in 1965 at age 34; she was the author of the play A RAISIN IN THE SUN. By all accounts, she was a force of nature: radical, courageous, and a prescient artist-intellectual. This is the first biography in decades, and describes Hansberry as a complete person, showing her prodigious intellect, emotions, activism, and varied relationships during the key years of the Civil Rights movement. [From publisher's description]

Born in Missouri in 1928, Maya Angelou had a difficult childhood. Jim Crow laws segregated blacks and whites in the South. Her family life was unstable at times. But much like her poem, "Still I Rise," Angelou was able to lift herself out of her situation and flourish. She moved to California and became the first black and first female streetcar operator before following her interest in dance. She became a professional performer in her twenties and...

Presents profiles of ten African-American women whose efforts on behalf of racial justice and freedom have influenced the course of history.

"The story of the mother of Emmett Till, and how she channeled grief over her son's death into a call to action for the civil rights movement"-- Provided by publisher.

"Until I Am Free explores the political ideas and philosophies of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer"-- Provided by publisher.

A sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching - a practice that imperiled not only the lives of Black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race. At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Born to slaves in Mississippi, Wells began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies' car on the Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation's first campaign...

Examines the historical icon's six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement.

"Published in English for the first time, this is the memoir of the fabulous, rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker"-- Provided by publisher.