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Profiles sixteen high-achieving African Americans, including magician Richard Potter, concert singer Sissieretta Jones, and architect Paul R. Williams.

Recounts actor Sidney Poitier's public and private life as he broke racial barriers to launch a pioneering acting career playing characters who said something positive, useful, and lasting about the human condition. Includes photographs.

Describes the life of the sharecroppers' son who became an Olympic legend and challenged Hitler's dream of Aryan superiority.

An introduction to the life Martin Luther King, Jr. Including how he organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott and African American people across the country in support of the right to vote, desegregation, and other basic civil rights.

Gary Payton describes his childhood in Oakland, California, his college years, his basketball career with the Seattle Supersonics, and his turn as an Olympic champion in 1996, using events from his life to illustrate the importance of self-confidence.

Booker T. Washington rose from his slavery beginnings to become a national leader in education and civil rights. Beginning his career as a teacher and developing into a renowned speaker, Washington's influence is still felt today through Tuskegee University, which he originally founded.

A memoir by the former NASA astronaut and NFL wide receiver traces his personal journey from the gridiron to the stars, examining the intersecting roles of community, perseverance, and grace that create opportunities for success.

Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity...

Rick Ross is an indomitable presence in the music industry, but few people know his full story. Now, for the first time, Ross offers a vivid, dramatic and unexpectedly candid account of his early childhood, his tumultuous adolescence and his dramatic ascendancy in the world of hip-hop. Born William Leonard Roberts II, Ross grew up "across the bridge," in a Miami at odds with the glitzy beaches, nightclubs and yachts of South Beach. In the aftermath...

A brief biography of the escaped slave who spoke out against slavery and eventually became President Abraham Lincoln's advisor.