Jordan escaped slavery once. Must he escape again? Ashadowy figure lurks on the dark riverfront near the Christina. Libby is sure that it must be the cruel slave trader Riggs, who has vowed that no slave of his will ever escape alive. Does Riggs suspect that the runaway Jordan is hiding on her pa’s steamboat? Track Libby, Caleb, and Jordan in the second book of the Freedom Seeker’s series as they race to keep Jordon free from the clutches of slavery. Libby and Caleb scan the crowds of passengers bound for the Minnesota Territory. Has Riggs slipped by and boarded the Christina unnoticed? From the golden age of steamboats, the rush of immigrants to new lands, and the dangers of the Underground Railroad come true-to-life stories of courage, integrity, and suspense in the Freedom Seekers series.
Gwendolyn Patton's parents moved north from Alabama to Detroit in the Great Migration, ensuring that their children would avoid the worst that the post-Reconstruction South had to offer. As a young woman, Patton would return to Montgomery, Alabama, just in time for the civil rights movement, becoming engaged in protests and political demonstrations as a student at Tuskegee University. Shocked by the subjugation of black Americans in the South, she would participate in landmark civil rights events, such as the Selma-to-Montgomery March led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My Race to Freedom is the story of how Patton's eyes were opened to the injustices of the Jim Crow South and how one young woman helped make equality a reality for Southern African Americans.
The Freedom Race, Lucinda Roy’s explosive first foray into speculative fiction, is a poignant blend of subjugation, resistance, and hope. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic civil war known as the Sequel, ideological divisions among the states have hardened. In the Homestead Territories, an alliance of plantation-inspired holdings, Black labor is imported from the Cradle, and Biracial “Muleseeds” are bred. Raised in captivity on Planting 437, kitchen-seed Jellybean “Ji-ji” Lottermule knows there is only one way to escape. She must enter the annual Freedom Race as a runner. Ji-ji and her friends must exhume a survival story rooted in the collective memory of a kidnapped people and conjure the voices of the dead to light their way home. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Focusing on Chicago and downstate Illinois politics during the incredibly oppressive decades between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932_a period that is often described as the nadir of black life in Ame
The civil rights movement was defined by figures thrust into positions of importance; be they participants in a sit-in, Freedom Riders, or marchers in protests, those involved with the movement didn’t imagine being in that position ten years earlier. Gwendolyn Patton’s life centered around Detroit, Michigan, until she came to Montgomery in 1956 to visit relatives and found herself in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That experience sparked a lifetime of civil rights activism, as Patton became a member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, supported the Freedom Riders, organized in Tuskegee, and participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Patton came to call Montgomery her home, and the movement and its legacy became the most important aspect of her life. My Race to Freedom is the story of how a young woman found her voice and used it to help her community.
The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom. A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.
Mira Slovak was born in Czechoslovakia and endured both the Nazi occupation and the brutal Russian liberation. He joined the Czech Air force, rising to captain by the age of twenty-one. When he could no longer tolerate life under the Communists, he hijacked an airliner and flew across the Iron Curtain to freedom. He went to work for the CIA and was eventually sent to the US and given a job as Bill Boeing, Jr.'s personal pilot. When Boeing began racing hydroplanes in the late 1950s, Mira was his driver. During his ten-year career as a hydroplane driver, he won many races and two national championships. He met presidents and dated movie starlets. After a serious hydroplane accident, Slovak switched to airplanes, and won another national championship. When he retired from racing, he became a stunt pilot and public speaker and talked about the value of freedom and how we should value it above everything else. He outlasted Communism and when it collapsed in 1990, he returned to his home, only to realize that his true home was, and always would be, the United States.
In Betty Reid Soskin’s 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national epidemic, blackface minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, white women had only just won the right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until her mid-20s, Betty heard stories of slavery and the times of terror and struggle for black folk that followed. In her lifetime, Betty has watched the nation begin to confront its race and gender biases when forced to come together in the World War II era; seen our differences nearly break us apart again in the upheavals of the civil rights and Black Power eras; and, finally, lived long enough to witness both the election of an African-American president and the re-emergence of a militant, racist far right. The child of proud Louisiana Creole parents who refused to bow down to Southern discrimination, Betty was raised in the Bay Area black community before the great westward migration of World War II. After working in the civilian home front effort in the war years, she and her husband, Mel Reid, helped break down racial boundaries by moving into a previously all-white community east of the Oakland hills, where they raised four children while resisting the prejudices against the family that many of her neighbors held. With Mel, she opened up one of the first Bay Area record stores in Berkeley both owned by African-Americans and dedicated to the distribution of African-American music. Her volunteer work in rehabilitating the community where the record shop began eventually led her to a paid position as a state legislative aide, helping to plan the innovative Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, then to a “second” career as the oldest park ranger in the history of the National Park Service. In between, she used her talents as a singer and songwriter to interpret and chronicle the great American social upheavals that marked the 1960s. In 2003, Betty displayed a new talent when she created the popular blog CBreaux Speaks, sharing the sometimes fierce, sometimes gently persuasive, but always brightly honest story of her long journey through an American and African-American life. Blending together selections from many of Betty’s hundreds of blog entries with interviews, letters, and speeches, Sign My Name to Freedom invites you along on that journey, through the words and thoughts of a national treasure who has never stopped looking at herself, the nation, or the world with fresh eyes.
