The city of Denver was born during the great "Pikes Peak or Bust" gold rush of 1859 when flakes of placer gold were found where the South Platte River meets Cherry Creek. With the discovery of more gold, Denver became a boomtown, and African American pioneers began to arrive in search of prosperity and a better future. Initially, Denver's African Americans lived scattered throughout the city and in the Cherry Creek area. By the late 1890s, most had relocated to the Five Points Neighborhood. Many worked in Denver during the week and farmed their homesteads in Dearfield on the weekends. They often spent their holidays at Winks Lodge and summers at Camp Nizhone.

By the 1870s, the word was out about Colorado. East coast and Midwest prospectors, European immigrants, and African Americans newly freed from slavery, rushed to Denver to find work and their fortune in silver and gold. Captured here in almost 200 vintage images is the story of the African Americans who escaped the oppression and racism of the post Civil War South, and created a city within a city: the Five Points neighborhood of Denver. Named in 1881 for a bustling five-way intersection, the Five Points area became the commercial and social sector for African American churches, businesses, clubs, and homes, and the heart of Denver's black community. Showcased here are the photographs of once thriving Five Points businesses in the Welton Street business district, such as Otha Rice's Tap Room and Oven and the Rossonian Hotel, as well as the familiar faces of the Cosmopolitan Club, Madame CJ Walker, and Dr. Justina Ford, Denver's first African-American female doctor.

An award-winning journalist’s dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun? In The Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story, The Holly is a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.

Since the founding of St. Louis in 1764, Downtown St. Louis has been a center of black cultural, economic, political, and legal achievements that have shaped not only the city of St. Louis, but the nation as well. From James Beckworth, one of the founders of Denver, Colorado, to Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress and author of the only behind-the-scenes account of Lincoln's White House years, black residents of Downtown St. Louis have made an indelible mark in American history. From the monumental Dred Scott case to entertainers such as Josephine Baker, Downtown St. Louis has been home to many unforgettable faces, places, and events that have shaped and strengthened the American experience for all.

Thirteen essays examine the roles African-Americans played in the settling of the American West, discussing the slaves of Mormons and California gold miners; African-American army men, cowboys, and newspaper founders; and others on the frontier. Also includes a bibliographic essay.

Beginning in the 1840s, black men and women heard the call to go west, migrating to California in search of gold, independence, freedom, and land to call their own. By the mid-1850s, a lively African American community had taken root in San Francisco. Churches and businesses were established, schools were built, newspapers were published, and aid societies were formed. For the next century, the history of San Francisco's African American community mirrored the nation's slow progress toward integration with triumphs and setbacks depicted in images of schools, churches, protest movements, business successes, and political struggles.

An NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work—Non Fiction James Beard award–winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history. Daisy McAfee Bonner, for example, FDR's cook at his Warm Springs retreat, described the president's final day on earth in 1945, when he was struck down just as his lunchtime cheese souffle emerged from the oven. Sorrowfully, but with a cook's pride, she recalled, "He never ate that souffle, but it never fell until the minute he died." A treasury of information about cooking techniques and equipment, the book includes twenty recipes for which black chefs were celebrated. From Samuel Fraunces's "onions done in the Brazilian way" for George Washington to Zephyr Wright's popovers, beloved by LBJ's family, Miller highlights African Americans' contributions to our shared American foodways. Surveying the labor of enslaved people during the antebellum period and the gradual opening of employment after Emancipation, Miller highlights how food-related work slowly became professionalized and the important part African Americans played in that process. His chronicle of the daily table in the White House proclaims a fascinating new American story.

An early slave narrative, a skilfully woven satire on the stereotypes of plantation life and the apparently beneficent white owner. Told as a series of gentle fables, in the style of Aesop. Featuring a new introduction for this new edition, The Conjure Woman is probably Chesnutt's most powerful work, a collection of stories set in post-war North Carolina. The main character is Uncle Julius, a former slave, who entertains a white couple from the North with fantastic tales of antebellum plantation life. Julius tells of supernatural phenomenon, hauntings, transfiguration, and conjuring, which were typical of Southern African-American folk tales at the time. Uncle Julius tells the stories in a way that speaks beyond his immediate audience, offering stories of slavery and inequality that are, to the enlightened reader, obviously wrong. The tales are fabulistic, like those of Uncle Remus or Aesop, with carefully crafted allegories on the psychological and social effects of slavery and racial injustice. Foundations of Black Science Fiction. New forewords and fresh introductions give long-overdue perspectives on significant, early Black proto-sci-fi and speculative fiction authors who wrote with natural justice and civil rights in their hearts, their voices reaching forward to the writers of today. The series foreword is by Dr Sandra Grayson.

2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award, Reference and Scholarship Honor Book for Nonfiction, Black Caucus of the American Library Association In this insightful and eclectic history, Adrian Miller delves into the influences, ingredients, and innovations that make up the soul food tradition. Focusing each chapter on the culinary and social history of one dish--such as fried chicken, chitlins, yams, greens, and "red drinks--Miller uncovers how it got on the soul food plate and what it means for African American culture and identity. Miller argues that the story is more complex and surprising than commonly thought. Four centuries in the making, and fusing European, Native American, and West African cuisines, soul food--in all its fried, pork-infused, and sugary glory--is but one aspect of African American culinary heritage. Miller discusses how soul food has become incorporated into American culture and explores its connections to identity politics, bad health raps, and healthier alternatives. This refreshing look at one of America's most celebrated, mythologized, and maligned cuisines is enriched by spirited sidebars, photographs, and twenty-two recipes.