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Correspondents include Juanita P. Alexander, William J. Bennett, Andrew Billingsley, John E. Bodnar, Randall K. Burkett, Carlos A. Brossard, Mariam K. Chamberlain, Arthur Huff Fauset, John Hope Franklin, G. Wayne Glick, Pearl Spears Gray, Iris Tillman Hill, Vincent Harding, Leonard Harris, Claude E. Harris, Alex Haley, Leonard Jeffries, Floyd Logan, Robert N. C. Nix, Robert C. Morris, Nell Irvin Painter, A. William Smith, and Stephen J. Wright.

A former slave turned cavalry scout becomes a hero for an African-American cavalry regiment in the Civil War. But, as the war draws to an end, the soldier, Joe Duckett, embarks on his most dangerous mission yet-to return to the plantation from which he escaped to find his wife and daughter. A Washington Post Notable Book. Also a winner of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. "The important story of black soldiers in the Union Army has finally found a writer of historical fiction equal to the occasion." James A McPherson, Professor of History, Princeton University

Returning home from his janitor's job early one morning, Obie Bullock--leader of a Philadelphia anti-violence group--stumbles upon a crime scene: someone has just slit the throat of a police officer. Armed with the officer's recovered revolver, Obie, an Iraq war vet, corners and kills the masked assassin, who turns out to be the youngest brother of a powerful, but imprisoned drug dealer. Demands for revenge follow, sparking the fast-paced action while simultaneously examining the lives of a working-class family struggling to survive in the projects of Philadelphia. Character-based, authentic, and gripping, this novel exposes the difficulties and danger of working to rid a neighborhood of drugs and violence so that future generations can grow up safe and secure.

A rich narrative recounting the life story of award-winning African American historian and novelist Allen B. Ballard, Breaching Jericho's Walls takes its readers on an exciting journey from a segregated Philadelphia community in the 1930s to mid-century Paris, Moscow, Cambridge, and Manhattan. The author reflects on his own pioneering role as he expands his horizons, as one of the first African American students at Ohio's Kenyon College, studying abroad in France and sharing a café table with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, serving in the military in the American South and attending graduate school at Harvard University. Becoming one of the nation's first black Russian specialists, Ballard studies in post-Stalinist Russia for a year, where, among other adventures, he spends a month with Michael Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, on a Soviet farm. Though he tells his own personal story within Breaching Jericho's Walls, Ballard also portrays the experiences of those northern African-Americans whose generations bridged the gap from the legacy of slavery to the breakdown of the segregated system in the 1950s and 1960s while revealing the crucial role that individuals like civil rights leader Paul Robeson, Olympic athletes Jesse Owens and Long John Woodruff, and scholar Alain Locke played in inspiring the hopes of an oppressed and downtrodden race. A memoir filled with entertaining anecdotes and insightful reflection, Breaching Jericho's Walls offers Ballard's compelling personal story and reveals how, brick by brick, African Americans built the road that led to the election of President Obama in 2008.

This book reflects on the lives and histories of Black Philadelphians and South Carolinians.

Obie Bullock, leader of a Philadelphia anti-violence group (the Mau-Mau), returns home from his janitor's job early one morning and stumbles upon a crime scene-someone has just slit the throat of a police officer. Armed with the officer's recovered revolver, Obie, an Iraq war vet, corners and kills the masked assassin, who turns out to be the youngest brother of a powerful, but imprisoned drug dealer. Demands for revenge follow, sparking the fast-paced action while simultaneously examining the lives of a working-class family struggling to survive in the projects of Philadelphia.Character-based, authentic, and gripping, this novel exposes the difficulties and danger of working to rid a neighborhood of drugs and violence so that future generations can grow up safe and secure.

"Rules of the supreme court. In force February 1, 1914": v. 94, p. vii-xx.