"When Valerie Jarrett interviewed a promising young lawyer named Michelle Robinson in July 1991 for a job in Chicago city government, neither knew that it was the first step on a path that would end in the White House. Jarrett soon became Michelle and Barack Obama's trusted personal adviser and family confidante; in the White House, she was known as the one who "got" him and helped him engage his public life. Jarrett joined the White House team on...

"Susan Burton's world changed in an instant when her five-year-old son was killed by a van driving down their street. Consumed by grief and without access to professional help, Susan self-medicated, becoming addicted first to cocaine, then crack. As a resident of South Los Angeles, a black community under siege in the War on Drugs, it was but a matter of time before Susan was arrested. She cycled in and out of prison for over fifteen years; never...

"A few months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, kicking off the U.S. civil rights movement, making headlines around he world and becoming an enduring symbol of the fight for dignity and equality, another young black woman refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was the wrong person at the right time, and so History did not choose her. Her name was Claudette...

A seamstress and friend of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln describes her days as a slave and her memories of the Lincolns.

"All rise for Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black female United States Supreme Court. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson knew from the very beginning that "You can do anything. You can be anything." Driven by those powerful words and her parents' love, Ketanji refused to let naysayers stop her from rising to the top. Her perseverance and her wits led her to become the first Black woman to become a US district judge and eventually the first Black female...

"Decades before Elvis Presley was dubbed the King of Rock and Roll, before Billy Haley played 'Rock Around the Clock,' and before the Beatles revolutionized popular music, there was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Black guitar player from Cotton Plant, Arksansas."--

"An elegant, unforgiving poem narrating Ona Judge's self-emancipation from George Washington's household"--

Introduces Rosa Parks, who made history by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person in 1950s Montgomery, Alabama.

"The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a white girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a black man. At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race. And so Sarah...