Detective Alex Cross tells the story of an ancestor, Abraham Cross, and his experiences with lawyer Ben Corbett, recounting one man's pursuit of justice in the face of the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan racism and violence in 1906 Eudora, Mississippi.

Hadjii remembers the trials and tribulations of youth in Don't Let My Mama Read This. From the havoc that a boy's crusty underwear can wreak on a family's reputation to the first time getting caught coming home drunk, Hadjii covers all the aspects of a "blessedly normal" childhood.

In this travelogue and memoir, groundbreaking novelist Erskine Caldwell looks back at a life lived in the troubled South Five decades removed from his own Southern childhood, novelist Erskine Caldwell sets out on a journey to find an old friend-a friend lost to him through the culture of segregation. As Caldwell follows a trail through Georgia, South Carolina, and much of the Deep South in search of his black childhood friend Bisco, his interviews...

A Southern white writer, educator, and activist, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) spoke out all her life against injustice. In Killers of the Dream, her most influential book, she draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation-the intricate system of taboos-that undergirded Southern society. Published to wide controversy, it became the source (acknowledged...

Sarah Patton Boyle's personal crusade for civil rights began in the fall of 1950, when the University of Virginia refused to admit Gregory Swanson, the Negro student who challenged its policy of segregation. Confident that this wrong could be righted quickly, Mrs. Boyle, the wife of a professor at the University, went forth to do her share-to meet not only with the burning crosses of white hatred but with decided wariness on the part of Negroes. Here...

Cane is an innovative literary work, part drama, part poetry, part fiction powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets.

In 1953 ten-year-old Octobia May lives in her Aunt's boarding house in the South, surrounded by an African American community which has its own secrets and internal racism, and spends her days wondering if Mr. Davenport in room 204 is really a vampire--or something else entirely.

Lawrence Hill is a writer of immense talent-and his literary reputation grows with each new work. Canadian Langston Cane V finds his writing career (and, indeed, his life) in stasis until inspired by his mentor to write about an ancestor who purportedly died fighting alongside John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Traveling to Baltimore, the latter-day Cane delves into history and in so doing awakens to new possibilities.

Researches the character of slavery, new freedom and racial relationships on both blacks and whites of the Reconstruction period.

"Traces the history of Reconstruction, from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1877, when federal troops were removed from the South"--Provided by publisher.