4 Books Published by NewSouth Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

From his childhood in New Orleans to Howard University as a boy of fifteen, from his work as a young pastor in Alabama to his leadership role in the SCLC, from serving as the first Black congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction to serving as the Ambassador to the United Nations, from two transformational terms as mayor of Atlanta to co-chairmanship of the 1996 Summer Olympics Games, from co-founding Good Works International to promoting human rights across the globe with the Andrew Young Foundation, The Many Lives of Andrew Young tells the inspiring, dramatic story of civil rights hero, congressman, ambassador, mayor, and American icon Andrew Young.

Featuring hundreds of full-color photographs that capture the extraordinary life and times of Andrew Young and a captivating narrative by acclaimed Atlanta Journal-Constitution race reporter Ernie Suggs, filled with personal accounts from Andrew Young himself, The Many Lives of Andrew Young is both a tribute to and an essential chronicle of the life of a man whose activism and service changed the face of America and whose work continues to reverberate around the world today.

In the aftermath of the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other African Americans, plus the worldwide protests that followed, editors Ansa and Lloyd, created a project to bring voices of African-American women together to honestly and transparently share how race and culture have affected them in ways related to their families, their careers and their communities.

The essays in Meeting at the Table: African American Women Write on Race, Culture and Community will not only enlighten readers, but offer paths into the vital conversations across racial, cultural and communal divides.

The editors have collected a diverse group of women whose stories will inform, enlighten and educate readers who have some knowledge about race and culture and other readers who are looking for well-written and instructive ways to engage in the path toward social justice.

Together, Ansa and Lloyd, friends since their college days, have more than 100 years of writing and editing experience as journalists and authors.

Cover art contributed by Synthia Saint James.

Wanda Smalls Lloyd’s Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism―with a foreword by best-selling author Tina McElroy Ansa―is the memoir of an African American woman who grew up privileged and educated in the restricted culture of the American South in the 1950s–1960s. Her path was shaped by segregated social, community, and educational systems, religious and home training, a strong cultural foundation, and early leadership opportunities. Despite Jim Crow laws that affected where she lived, how she was educated, and what civil rights she would be denied, Lloyd grew up to realize her childhood dream of working as a professional journalist. In fact, she would eventually hold some of the nation’s highest-ranking newspaper editorial positions and become one of the first African American women to be the top editor of a mainstream daily newspaper.

Along the way she helped her newspapers and other media organizations understand how the lack of newsroom and staff diversity interfered with perceptions of accuracy and balance for their audiences. Her memoir is thus a window on the intersection of race, gender, culture and the media’s role in our uniquely American experiment in democracy. How Lloyd excelled in a profession where high-ranking African American women were rare is a memorable story that will educate, entertain, and inspire. Coming Full Circle is a self-reflective exploration of the author’s life journey from growing up in coastal Savannah, Georgia, to editing roles at seven daily newspapers around the country, and circling back to her retirement in Savannah, where she now teaches journalism to a new generation.

American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality African residents preceded the English by a century and arrived in the Americas in numbers that far exceeded European migrants up until 1820. Afro-Americans were omnipresent in the founding and advancement of the Americas, and recurrently outnumbered Europeans at many times and places, from colonial Peru to antebellum Virginia. African-descended people contributed to every facet of American history as explorers, conquistadores, settlers, soldiers, sailors, servants, slaves, rebels, leaders, lawyers, litigants, laborers, artisans, artists, activists, translators, teachers, doctors, nurses, inventors, investors, merchants, mathematicians, scientists, scholars, engineers, entrepreneurs, generals, cowboys, pirates, professors, politicians, priests, poets, and presidents. The multitude of events and mixed-race individuals included in the book underscores that black and white Americans share the same history, and in many cases, the same ancestry. American Founders is meant to celebrate this shared heritage and strengthen these bonds.