Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America
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ISBN: 0140178228
Format: Paperback, 736pp
Pub. Date: May 1984
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

"...will introduce parents to some "real" history so that they may teach their children."
—Akil Bomani

Before the Mayflower traces black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey that ended in slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in an exploration of the complex realities of African-American life in the 1990s. Here is the most recent scholarship on the geographic, social, ethnic, economic, and cultural journey of "the other Americans," together with vital portraits of black pioneers and seminal figures in the struggle for freedom, as well as additional material on historical developments in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years.

Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln and the White Dream
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ISBN: 0874850851
Format: Hardcover, 652pp
Pub. Date: February 2000
Publisher: Johnson Publishing Company, Incorporated

Read an AALBC.com Book Review

A BOOK THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU LOOK AT YOURSELF, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE CIVIL WAR, RACE, AND AMERICAN HISTORY


The basic idea of the book is simple: EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT LINCOLN AND RACE IS WRONG. No other American story, the author says, is so enduring as that of Lincoln as the "Great Emancipator." No other American story is so comforting. No other American story is so false.

Great Moments in Black History: Wade in the Water
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ISBN: 0874850789
Format: Hardcover, 312pp
Pub. Date: January 2000
Publisher: Johnson Publishing Company, Incorporated

Lerone Bennett Jr., author of the Black history classic, Before The Mayflower, dramatizes fifteen turning points in the shaping of Black and White America. In the process, the prolific author of some of Black America's most readable books proves once again that history has a human face that speaks to the deepest hopes and aspirations of readers of all races and creeds.
Great Moments in Black History, formerly called Wade In The Water, gives the reader a front-row seat at some of the most dramatic events in American history. Starting with the founding of Black America at the first Black convention, the book re-creates the drama and the human dimensions of Nat Turner's slave revolt and Harriet Tubman's slave raids and makes the reader a witness and a participant in key events of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Freedom Movement of the twentieth century. There is also a pioneering chapter onsports as history, Jack Johnson and the Great White Hope, which was the basis of the national television show.

Bennett, who is the author of ten books, maintains that "in history, as in art, there is a dialectical connection between the inner detail and the whole, neither of which can be understood or explained without reference to the other."

Great Moments in Black History underlines that theme in fifteen historical episodes that will change your perception of the Black and White past.

Pioneers in Protest
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ISBN: 0874850266
Format: Hardcover, 267pp
Pub. Date: September 1968
Publisher: Johnson Publishing Company, Incorporated

“Without being preachy or pedantic, Bennett warmly relates the conviction, the determination, the achievements-indeed-the heroism of 20 men and women who began the fight which ultimately led to the revolution taking place in America today.”  —Philadelphia Bulletin

Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African Americans, 1619-1990s
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ISBN: 0140175687
Format: Paperback, 368pp
Pub. Date: June 1993
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African Americans, 1619-1990s

What forces transformed Africans into African-Americans? In what way did their presence shape the attitudes--and fortunes--of white America? How did black people become a nation within a nation? And what are the prospects for that nation in the 1990s?

These are among the questions that Lerone Bennett, Jr., addresses in this triumphant companion volume to his epochal Before the Mayflower.Where that book rendered the African-American experience chronologically, The Shaping of Black America tells its story from a developmental perspective. Its first section, "Foundations," encompasses black slaves and white indentured servants, the black founding fathers, and the relationship between African-American and Indians. In the second section, "Directions," Bennett traces the growth of black labor and black capital and the development of a system that unites and separates blacks and whites. The result is a bold and literate work that persuasively demonstrates its author's notion that "blacks lived a different time and a different reality in this country."

What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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ISBN: 0874850274
Format: Hardcover, 251pp
Pub. Date: February 1976
Publisher: Johnson Publishing Company, Incorporated
 

“An eloquent account:” —NEWSDAY.

“(Bennett) has succeeded in giving his readers an intimate look into the physical, mental, and spiritual growth of Dr. King.” —BOSTON GLOBE