I originally posted this list on my teen site earlier this week.

AA Book Reading List Suggestions

List compiled by Shelia M. Goss

Below is a list of books either by or about African-American pioneers. The books can be found at your local library or from an online retailer.

The early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene.
Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo

Carter G. Woodson : the father of Black history
McKissack, Pat

Carter G. Woodson : a life in Black history
Goggin, Jacqueline Anne

Art from her heart : folk artist Clementine Hunter
Whitehead, Kathy

Clementine Hunter : the African house murals
Hunter, Clementine

Talking with Tebe : Clementine Hunter, memory artist
Hunter, Clementine

Coretta Scott King
Waxman, Laura Hamilton

Coretta Scott King : first lady of civil rights
Stanley, George E.

Coretta Scott King : civil rights activist
Rhodes, Lisa Renee

Minnie’s sacrifice ; Sowing and reaping ; Trial and triumph : three rediscovered novels
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

A brighter coming day : a Frances Ellen Watkins Harper reader
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

Three classic African-American novels
Brown, William Wells

Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site : junior ranger activity book. DOC
United States. National Park Service.

Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark by Katherine Mellen Charron

Ready from Within: Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A First Person Narrative by Septima Poinsette Clark and Cynthia Stokes Brown

From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans by John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr.

Shelia M. Goss compiled this list for her in person lecture during Black History Month. She is the author of the young adult series – The Lip Gloss Chronicles: The Ultimate Test, Splitsville, and Paper Thin.

For more information or to sign up to The Lip Gloss Chronicles mailing list, visit www.thelipglosschronicles.com or www.sheliagoss.com.

I’m highlighting Mary Eliza Mahoney today for two reasons. #1 She was the first African-American registered nurse and #2 Our past might be entwined as her name comes up when I trace my family history on my Dad’s side.

Her exact date of birth is questionable. Some sources say she was born in April and others May of 1845.

According to various sources, including ASU, Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the U.S.A. She was born free on April 7 or May 7, 1845 in Dorchester, Massachusetts and became interested in nursing when she was a teenager. She worked for fifteen years at the New England Hospital for Women and Children (now Dimock Community Health Center) in Roxbury, Massachusetts as a cook, janitor, washerwoman and an unofficial nurse’s assistant. In 1878, at the age of thirty-three, she was admitted as a student into the hospital’s nursing program established by Dr. Marie Zakrzewska. Sixteen months later, she was one of four who completed the rigorous course (of forty-two who started with her). After graduation she worked primarily as a private duty nurse for the next thirty years all over the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. She ended her nursing career as director of an orphanage in Long Island, New York, the position she had held for a decade. She never married.In 1896, Mahoney became one of the original members of a predominately white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (later known as the American Nurses Association or ANA). In 1908 she was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). Mahoney gave the welcoming address at the first convention of the NACGN and served as the association’s national chaplain. Mary Eliza Mahoney died January 4, 1926. She is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts.

In 1936, the NACGN created an award in honor of Mahoney for women who contributed to racial integration in nursing. This award was then continued by the ANA after the NACGN was dissolved in 1951. In 1976, fifty years after her death, Mary Eliza Mahoney was inducted into the Nursing Hall of Fame.

To read more about Mary Eliza Mahoney, click here.

If you know someone interested in nursing, there’s a Mary Mahoney scholarship given out to minority nursing students. There’s a site dedicated to Mary Mahoney. Please visit: http://www.marymahoney.org
Win a copy of Martin Luther King: The Essential Box Set:

The Landmark Speeches and Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. By Clayborne Carson, Kris Shepard, Peter Holloran

What do you have to do to enter? Leave a comment on this blog post. This is the last opportunity to enter. You can check archives to enter on previous blog posts. (Sign up to mailing list so you’ll be alerted of the March contests–2 books and 1 DVD). The more you comment, the more chances you have to win. Contest ends on February 28, 2010. U.S. & Canada residents only. Avoid where prohibited by law.

Social activist Dorothy Height was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 24, 1912.

At an early age, she moved with her family to Rankin, Pennsylvania. While in high school, Height was awarded a scholarship to New York University for her oratory skills, where she studied and earned her master’s degree.

Height began her career working as a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department, but at the age of twenty-five, she began her career as a civil rights activist when she joined the National Council of Negro Women. She fought for equal rights for both African Americans and women, and in 1944 she joined the national staff of the YWCA. She remained active with the organization until 1977, and while there she developed leadership training programs and interracial and ecumenical education programs.

In 1957, Height was named president of the National Council of Negro Women, a position she held until 1997. During the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Height organized “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” which brought together black and white women from the north and South to create a dialogue of understanding. Leaders of the United States regularly took her counsel, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Height also encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to desegregate schools and President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint African American women to positions in government.

Height has served on a number of committees, including as a consultant on African affairs to the secretary of state, the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped and the President’s Committee on the Status of Women. Her tireless efforts for equal rights have earned her the praise and recognition of numerous organizations, as well. She has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom From Want Award and the NAACP Spingarn Medal. She has also been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2004, Height was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President George W. Bush.

To read more, go to History Makers.

Dorothy I. Height has received many awards and citations. See list compiled by NCNW:

• John F. Kennedy Memorial Award
• Hadassah Myrtle Wreath of Achievement
• Ministerial Interfaith Association Award
• Ladies Home Journal - Woman of the Year
• Congressional Black Caucus - Decades of Service
• President Ronald Reagan - Citizens Medal
• Franklin Roosevelt - Freedom Medal
• Essence Award
• Camille Cosby World of Children Award
• Caring Institute - Caring Award
• NAACP - Spingarn Medal
• National Women’s Hall of Fame
• President Bill Clinton - Presidential Medal of Freedom
• On Height’s 92nd birthday March 24, 2004, President George W. Bush presented her the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian and most distinguished award presented by the United States Congress.

Learn more about Dr. Dorothy Height by adding her book to your collection and sharing it with someone else.

Two of my favorite authors, Donna Grant and Virginia DeBerry, are guest blogging over on the White Readers Meet Black Authors blog.

A question we are asked all the time, maybe second only to, “How do you write TOGETHER?” is “Where do you get your ideas?” We suspect ours come from the same place most writers mine for story—EVERYWHERE. Inspiration can begin with a conversation overheard in line at the supermarket, observing a couple in a restaurant, recalling a childhood experience, watching a news story where you know there’s another side—maybe even three or four that are not being told. Wherever you have people interacting, or not interacting, the potential for plot lines and characters exists. Everyday circumstances become a jumping off point and when we leap we don’t always know where we’ll land. Often not where we expected.

To read their entire post, click here.

Uptown is Donna Grant and Virginia Deberry’s new release. I’ve ordered mine. Have you ordered yours?

In the 1948 summer Olympics, Alice Coachman became the first African American woman to win a gold medal.

According to the New Georgia Encylopedia, Few athletes have dominated a sport as thoroughly as Alice Coachman dominated the high jump. Named to five All-American teams, she won a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics, becoming the first African American woman to do so. She has been inducted into eight halls of fame.

Born in 1923 in Albany, GA, the fifth of Fred and Evelyn Coachman’s ten children, Coachman grew up in the segregated South. Barred from public sports facilities because of her race, Coachman used whatever materials she could piece together to practice jumping. Coping with a society that discouraged women from being involved in sports, Coachman struggled to develop as an athlete.

When Coachman finally got the chance to compete in the Olympics, in the 1948 London games, she qualified easily despite a back injury. She defeated her closest competitor, the British high jumper Dorothy Tyler, on the first jump of the finals, setting a record of 5 feet 6 1/8 inches. King George VI personally presented the gold medal to her.

Coachman returned to the United States a hero. After her Olympic victory she retired from athletics, even though she was only twenty-five and in excellent physical condition. She became the first African American woman to benefit from endorsements. She also taught, coached, and became involved in the Job Corps. Always a supporter of athletes, she later formed the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides assistance to young athletes and helps former Olympic athletes adjust to life after the games. During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta she was honored as one of the 100 greatest Olympic athletes in history.

To read more facts about Alice Coachman, visit her website: http://www.alicecoachman.org/bio_accomplishments.html

My nephew’s mom was named after the woman I’m highlighting today–Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987). I found out a few weeks ago that Septima’s mother communicated with Ms. Clark on numerous occasions and that’s how she ended up with the unique name.

Who is Septima Poinsette Clark? She was an American educator and civil rights activist. She is known as the “Queen mother” or “Grandmother of the American Civil Rights Movement.”

Clark was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1898. Her father, Peter Poinsette, was born a slave on the Joel Poinsette farm between the Waccamaw River and Georgetown. After the Civil War, he got a job as a caterer. Her mother, Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, was born in Charleston but raised in Haiti by her uncle, who took her and her two sisters there in 1864. She returned to Charleston after the Civil War and worked as a launderer.

Clark graduated from high school in 1916. Due to financial constraints, she was not able to attend college, but began work as a school teacher. As an African American, she was barred from teaching in the Charleston, South Carolina public schools, but was able to find a position teaching in a rural school district, on John’s Island, the largest of the Sea Islands.

In 1919, she returned to Charleston to teach sixth grade at Avery Normal Institute, a private academy for black children. In Charleston, she began attending meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Her first task with the NAACP was to knock on doors and ask people to sign petitions. One of the causes she petitioned for was to allow blacks to become principals in Charleston’s public schools.

Clark is most famous for establishing “Citizenship Schools” teaching reading to adults throughout the Deep South. While the project served to increase literacy, it also served as a means to empower Black communities. Citizenship schools were frequently taught in the back room of a shop so as to elude the violence of racist whites. The teachers of citizenship schools were often people who had learned to read as adults as well, as one of the primary goals of the citizenship schools was to develop more local leaders for people’s movements. Teaching people how to read helped countless Black Southerners push for the right to vote, but beyond that, it developed leaders across the country that would help push the civil rights movement long after 1964. The citizenship schools are just one example of the empowerment strategy for developing leaders that was core to the civil rights movement in the South.

To read her entire bio, click here.

I would also recommend a book co-authored by Septima Clark herself: Ready from Within: Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A First Person Narrative

I’m excited to announce my next book release–Hollywood Deception.
Hope you enjoy the video.

According to BlackAmericaWeb, Sarah Rector, a former slave, became one of the richest little girls in America in 1914. The headlines would read: “Oil Made Pickaninny Rich – Oklahoma Girl With $15,000 A Month Gets Many Proposals – Four White Men in Germany Want to Marry the Negro Child That They Might Share Her Fortune.”

$15,000 a month back then is probably the equivalent to millions a month now. I came across the most fascinating article the other day about Sarah Rector. Below is a short excerpt from the article and the link.

When she was born, Rector was given a rough, hilly allotment, considered worthless agriculturally, in Glenpool, 60 miles from where she and her family lived. Her father had petitioned the Muskogee County Court to sell the land, but he was denied because of certain restrictions placed on the land, for which he was required to continue paying taxes.

In 1913, when she was ten years old, large pools of oil were discovered on Rector’s land.  One year later, her land produced so much oil that she had already yielded $300,000; her fortune was increasing at a rate of $10,000 per month. Her mother had died years earlier from tuberculosis. In 1914, her father died in prison, leaving her orphaned.

Even before her father’s death, Rector was appointed a guardian who was responsible for managing Rector’s money and providing for her education and care. The law at the time required full-blooded Indians, black adults and children who were citizens of Indian Territory with significant property and money, to be assigned “well-respected” white guardians who often cheated them out of their lands. There are stories of swindlers, oil tycoons and other unscrupulous types who kidnapped and murdered the children and adults to get their land.

Click on the link to read more: http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/02/18/sarah-rector-the-richest-colored-girl-in-the-world/comment-page-1/#comment-2773

Here’s what’s on my shelf:

Be Careful What You Ask For by Kimberla Lawson Roby

3 Word Review: revenge, oh-no-he-didn’t, lessons

About Be Careful What You Ask For:

New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby returns with this delightful sequel to The Best of Everything, in which the infamous Reverend Curtis Black’s beautiful daughter, Alicia, is all grown up—and headed for trouble of her own

Her first marriage didn’t work out, but that isn’t going to stop Alicia Black, the privileged daughter of the charismatic Reverend Curtis Black, from getting what she wants. One month after her wedding to her second husband, she can’t believe her good fortune. God has heeded her prayers, blessing her with Pastor JT Valentine, a handsome, dynamic man of the cloth with his own large congregation, just like her father.

Unfortunately, Alicia doesn’t understand just how much like Curtis her new husband truly is. She doesn’t know that JT has been sneaking around town with other women—or that he only married her to get close to her father’s money and fame. But while Alicia is blinded by love, her dad certainly isn’t. He warned his little girl that JT simply can’t be trusted. After all, it takes one to know one, and who better to see into the darkness of a sinner’s heart than Curtis?

It will take a miracle to save the day. But God acts in mysterious ways, and soon a host of lies, longtime secrets, and acts of betrayal comes to light, and Alicia must face some very crucial and life-changing decisions. This time, she’s got to be careful what she prays for. . . .

Tender to His Touch by Adrianne Byrd

3 Word Review: chemistry, reunion, series

Tender to His Touch:

Hollington Homecoming Queen Beverly Turner is pulling out all the stops for her ten-year reunion. The trendy designer’s first order of business is to let loose and have some fun. And her wish just might come true when she meets Lucius Gray. The hunky, high-powered Atlanta attorney is looking for the same thing she is: a sexy fling with no strings.

Lucius needs a time-out from his workaholic life, and the chic, sensual designer more than fits the bill. Like Beverly, the single father has been burned by love. But Beverly is arousing feelings that are making him long to turn their sizzling affair into a lifetime of passion. If she’ll let him, he’ll give her the happy ending she deserves and prove to this unforgettable woman that there is life—and love—after college….

Sleep No More by Susan Crandall

3 Word Review: intense, thriller, nice

Sleep No More:

The night was always Abby Whitman’s enemy. As a young girl she walked in her sleep, and one night, she started a fire that scarred her sister for life and left Abby with unbearable guilt . . . and a loneliness that echoes within her. Now Abby has begun blacking out again–with apparently fatal results. A car accident has killed the son of a prominent family. Even though the evidence seems to exonerate her, Abby is plagued by doubts–and soon by mysterious threats. Psychiatrist Dr. Jason Coble is intrigued by Abby and offers to help her explore the dark recesses of her mind. Through this terrifying journey, Jason’s interest turns to passion, and he yearns to give her the love she craves. But first, Abby must trust him–and shed light on secrets that will rock this Southern town and reveal a danger that threatens them both.

Whitney Houston – The Deluxe Anniversary Edition is now available.

3 Word Review: Classic, Love, Flowing

What’s on your shelf?

Norma Sklarek became the first black woman to be licensed as an architect in New York and California.

According to the African-American Registry website: From New York City she graduated from Barnard College (part of Columbia University) with a degree in architecture in 1950. Sklarek became the first African-American woman to be licensed as an architect in the United States with certification in New York State in 1954 and in California in 1962. She was the first African-American woman director of architecture at Gruen and Associates in Los Angeles. In 1966, she was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Some twenty years later, in 1985, she became the first African-American woman architect to form her own architectural firm: Siegel, Sklarek, Diamond. At the time, this was the largest woman-owned and mostly woman-staffed architectural firm. Among Sklarek’s designs are the City Hall in San Bernardino, California, the Fox Plaza in San Francisco, Terminal One at the Los Angeles International Airport and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. From 1989 to 1992, Sklarek was a principal at The Jerde Partnership.

There she was in charge of project management and review of the functional and technological aspects of projects. Norma Sklarek is now semi-retired serving as Chair of the AIA National Ethics Council.

In her honor, Howard University offers the Norma Merrick Sklarek Architectural Scholarship Award.

To learn more about Norma Sklarek, go to: http://www.essortment.com/all/normasklarek_rqbo.htm

Win a copy of Martin Luther King: The Essential Box Set:

The Landmark Speeches and Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. By Clayborne Carson, Kris Shepard, Peter Holloran

What do you have to do to enter? Leave a comment on this blog post and there will be several other opportunities this month to enter but you have to check the bottom of random blog posts. (Sign up to mailing list so you’ll be alerted of new posts). The more you comment, the more chances you have to win. Contest ends on February 28, 2010. U.S. & Canada residents only. Avoid where prohibited by law.