Showing results by narrator "Lisa Renee-Pitts" in All Categories

This biography of educational activist and Black studies forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term "race woman" to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

The first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was no one like Effa Manley in the sports world of the 1930s and 1940s. She was a sophisticated woman who owned a baseball team. She never shrank from going head to head with men, who dominated the ranks of sports executives. That her life story remained unchronicled for so long can only be attributed to one thing: her team, the Newark Eagles, belonged to the Negro Leagues. Author James Overmyer brings to light new details regarding Effa Manley's fascinating story.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was "given, as a slave" to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green's library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai'i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility.

Telling her son's story against the backdrop of a society plagued by systemic racism, economic inequality, and mass incarceration, Golden offers a form of witness and testimony in a time of crisis for Black Americans. Explore Black boys' difficult road to adulthood in the US and learn why single Black mothers are often wrongly blamed for their sons' actions. Gain invaluable advice and knowledge from trustworthy sources. In Saving Our Sons, Golden documents her conversations with psychologists, writers, and young Black males themselves.

Overground Railroad chronicles the history of the Green Book, which was published from 1936 to 1966. For years, it was dangerous for African Americans to travel in the United States. Because of segregation, Black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or even get gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, stores, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for Black travelers. It took courage to be listed in it, and the stories from those who took a stand against racial segregation are recorded and celebrated.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses listeners in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises.

Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration - a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South.

What do you do when that voice in your head tells you you're not enough? Not smart enough, not pretty enough, not capable enough, not present enough. Where do you turn when the world's promise that you can have it all becomes a crushing expectation that you must do it all, at all times, and keep a smile fixed on your face while you wither inside? Unpacking the biblical story of Mary and Martha as she shares her own story of recognizing her unique giftedness, Denisse Copeland shares the liberating truth that you have a right to be you. Just you, at the feet of Jesus.

With specific principles and strategies to empower believers to combat demonic attacks and the temptation to return to old patterns, listeners will discover how to put on the full armor of God and develop a proactive strategy to maintain their deliverance, which includes removing everything from their lives that would give the enemy a legal right to put them back in bondage. Ruffin draws from her own experiences and gives specific strategies and warfare prayers to overthrow demonic plans, plots, and agendas to help Christians overcome the enemy.

Does anyone really get a second chance at love? In the newest installment in the Diamond's Fate series, author Angie Singleton once again invites readers into the world of Diamond Pearl Hope, who has had a difficult life struggling with her biracial identity, an abusive relationship, and her estranged family. Now, the 43-year-old anchorwoman is finding herself falling in love again! Diamond loves her job as an investigative reporter, but she can't drown out the ticking of her biological clock.

Is it okay to enjoy this life? Watching a gorgeous sunset. Sharing a laugh with a friend. Tasting a sun-ripened strawberry. Each day is full of opportunities for you to savor the countless gifts the creator has given. But do you feel free to delight in God's abundant gifts, or is your joy sometimes distorted by guilt, fear of idolatry, or simply an overwhelming awareness of sin's effects on this world?

It was called Freedom Summer, and they came to Mississippi by the hundreds, white and black, young and old. Their aim was elemental: secure the right to vote for blacks in the state. The hurdle they'd face would be daunting. Follow a reporter as she journeys to Mississippi and encounters the echoes of family and the struggle for civil rights.

Dylan Rudee's life is an epic fail. He's bullied at school and the aunt who has raised him since he was orphaned as a child just lost her job and their apartment. Dylan's one chance to help his family is the only thing he's good at: video games. The multibillion-dollar company Mee Corp. has announced a televised tournament to find the Game-Changers: the 44 kids who are the best in the world at playing Xamaica, a role-playing fantasy game that's sweeping the planet. If Dylan can win the top prize, he just might be able to change his life.

Helicopters thwopped low over the city, filming blocks of burning cars and buildings, mobs breaking into storefronts, and the vicious beating of truck driver Reginald Denny. For a week in April 1992, Los Angeles transformed into a cityscape of rage, purportedly due to the exoneration of four policemen who had beaten Rodney King. It should be no surprise that such intense anger erupted from something deeper than a single incident. In The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, Brenda Stevenson tells the dramatic story of an earlier trial, a turning point on the road to the 1992 riot.

Carrie has been a kitchen slave in Sam Fraunces’ tavern in New York City for as long as she can remember. But after she narrowly escapes a kidnapper, Carrie becomes more curious about her mysterious past. After all, she doesn’t even know her own last name. When her friend Dan Arabus comes to town, he talks about his dream of buying his mother’s freedom with the Continental notes his father left him. Deciding to help Dan discover how much the notes are worth, Carrie finds herself eavesdropping on Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and President Washington himself.

Navigating the world of dating can be like wandering an enchanted forest, full of creatures with peculiar habits and baffling behavior. In Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur, Francesca Lia Block provides a guide to this often-treacherous terrain, classifying all those mystifying men and women into various types of mythical forest fauna - Fauns and Werewolves, Mermaids and Banshees. After answering questions to determine your own type, you can learn to identify others.

Check it out: not just a book about sex, but a look at girl culture by teenagers. No stuffy school textbook. No nosy adults. Just a diverse group of teen girls from a community youth project who had questions about sexuality. To find answers, they collected stories, poetry, and artwork from other youths. They also interviewed frontline health experts to get solid facts about the personalities and pressures that young women have to deal with. It's a great mix of real-life examples and life-saving info.

City of Inmates explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and Black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.

In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anti-capitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. 

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.