Fleming Community Library

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...

After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...

A novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the governor of Maryland, the “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name from the city: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison.
 
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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic

Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.”
 
Margo...

"As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'black rage,' historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she writes, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.' Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time...

"Some things just don't keep well inside this house ... The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd's invitation to join him as a servant for a white family and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household. The secrets of the house are plentiful yet...

"Claudie is traveling from Harlem to Georgia with Mama and Cousin Sidney to meet her grandmother and cousins for the first time. She hopes that learning her family's story will inspire her for the variety show she's planning to raise money to save the boardinghouse her family lives in. Claudie's grandmother tells her a legend from slavery times called 'The People Could Fly.' In it, an old man whispers magic words, and the enslaved people grow wings...

Meet Claudie Wells. She is 9 years old and is surrounded by artists, writers, dancers, and the culture of the Harlem Renaissance during 1922. Everyone seems to be good at something, but Claudie can't find her special talent.

This companion volume to Masterpieces of World Literature (1989) highlights the literary achievements of African-American authors from the 18th century to the present with individual articles on 149 major works of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Each article contains the important facts and dates of authorship along with analyses of characters, settings, themes, and plots. A unique & vital guide that summarizes, explains, & evaluates the...