Central Kansas Library System

Through centuries of suffering, slavery, inequality, discrimination, segregation, and racist violence, African Americans have endured, resisted, fought, and, increasingly over time, won many battles. These victories were propelled by a groundswell of grassroots action, but they were also motivated and organized by courageous and inspirational leadership. Journalists, abolitionists, educators, religious leaders, politicians, judges, and even schoolchildren...

Veteran journalist Ifill sheds new light on the impact of Barack Obama's presidential victory and introduces the emerging African American politicians forging a new path to political power. Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker,...

An introduction to African-American political history that profiles influential African-Americans who shaped the country's development and promoted equal rights for minorities.

Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick demonstrates how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, then as a Harvard Law School graduate, and finally as President of the United States. "By looking at Obama's political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us...

The election of President Barack Obama was a watershed moment in American politics. This book examines Obama's historic presidential victory while also looking back at the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the transformation of race relations in the United States, and the achievements of prominent African American politicians. It explores the events of the Obama's life and examines the political realities that shaped him as a politician.

This program features two African-American politicians from different generations and opposite backgrounds. John Lewis grew up in a sharecropping family in rural Georgia, while Cory Booker was raised in an affluent, all-white New Jersey suburb. Although both men have devoted their lives to the betterment of African-American people, neither knows much about his own ancestors. In this episode, Booker is introduced to his white great-grandfather, a man...

Amid the deadly racial violence of the 1960s, an unassuming student from a fundamentalist Christian home in Omaha emerged as a leader and nationally recognized black activist. Ernest Chambers, elected to the Nebraska State Legislature in 1970, eventually became one of the most influential legislators the state has ever known. As Chambers bids for reelection in 2012 to the office he held for thirty-eight years, Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson...

From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War-a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era's political and cultural meaning for today's America. Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. We see...

Sometimes, politics make the strangest of bedfellows...and enemies. Terrell Warren is a rising star within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Buoyed his former heroic exploits in Desert Storm, the two-term senator has ascended quickly, currently being vetted as a part of the party's presidential ticket in the upcoming election cycle, entering rarified air as an African-American politician. He's charismatic, devilishly handsome, and possesses both...

Victoria Madaris shows Roman Malone, a rising U.S. senator, around her picturesque Catalina Cove at the encouragement of her matchmaking great-grandmother despite her mistrust of politicians.