Black Lives: Essays in African American Biography

From Booklist
While this collection is more eclectic and demanding than recent African American biography compendiums, it should find readers where interest in black history goes deeper than the "usual suspects" honored each February. Contributors consider figures from African, African American, and Caribbean cultures, and adopt different approaches to their subjects. The "Intellectual Biography" section includes essays on Maulana Karenga, Vinnette Carroll, General Daniel "Chappie" James Jr., and Rev. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In "Cultural Biography," contributors consider Harriet Jacobs, South African^-born writer Bessie Head, writers Elizabeth Ross Haynes and Maria Stewart, and composer William Levi Dawson. The studies in "Oral History and Biography as Teaching Tools" examine ways the lives of ordinary people can be and have been used for pedagogical purposes, focusing on twentieth-century Trinidad, slave narratives and fiction based on them, Malcolm X, Ghanian scholar James Emman Kewgyir Aggrey, and Emmett Jay Scott, Booker T. Washington's private secretary. Appropriate for larger libraries. Mary Carroll


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These fifteen chapters comprise groundbreaking biographical sketches of notable but heretofore unknown (or lesser known) African Americans, among them General Daniel "Chappie" James, Jr. (the first African American four-star general in the U.S. Air Force); William Levi Dawson (a composer); Vinnette Carroll (a director and playwright); Elizabeth Ross Haynes (an early political speaker and activist); Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church); Besse Head (a South African-born writer); Maria Stewart (a nineteenth-century African American writer); and a number of others.


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