NC LIVE'S Reading List on Anti-Racism: Biographies

Joe Gans captured the world lightweight title in 1902, becoming the first black American world title holder in any sport. Gans was a master strategist and tactician, and one of the earliest practitioners of "scientific" boxing. As a black champion reigning during the Jim Crow era, he endured physical assaults, a stolen title, bankruptcy, and numerous attempts to destroy his reputation. Four short years after successfully defending his title in the 42-round "Greatest Fight of the Century," Joe Gans was dead of tuberculosis. This biography features original round-by-round ringside telegraph reports of his most famous and controversial fights, a complete fight history, photographs, and early newspaper drawings and cartoons.

Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) was one of the most significant and controversial black leaders of the twentieth century. His followers called him the Messenger of Allah, while his critics labeled him a teacher of hate. Southern by birth, Muhammad moved north, eventually serving as the influential head of the Nation of Islam for over forty years. Claude Clegg III not only chronicles Muhammad's life, but also examines the history of American black nationalists and the relationship between Islam and the African American experience. In this authoritative biography, which also covers half a century of the evolution of the Nation of Islam, Clegg charts Muhammad's early life, his brush with Jim Crow in the South, his rise to leadership of the Nation of Islam, and his tumultuous relationship with Malcolm X. Clegg is the first biographer to weave together speeches and published works by Muhammad, as well as delving into declassified government documents, insider accounts, audio and video records, and interviews, producing the definitive account of an extraordinary man and his legacy.

Henry E. Frye came of age just as the South was beginning a transformational change. When he graduated from college in 1953, African Americans like him could only hope that the future would be different from the past. At the close of his public career in 2001, he was chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court--the head of the state's third branch of government. Throughout their lives, Frye and his wife, Shirley, were in the vanguard of the advances that shaped the lives of African Americans. His election to the state legislature in 1968 was the beginning of steady, determined efforts to expand opportunities for African Americans in politics, business and society at large. This book traces, along with his career, the growing participation of African Americans in the civic, political and social life of North Carolina.

This book brings to life one of baseball's greatest sluggers, Willie Stargell. It examines the factors that shaped him as a man growing up in the tumultuous racial times of the 1950s and '60s, and then recreates the major moments in his Hall of Fame baseball career. His various endeavors during the post-playing days are fully explored as well. Interviews with more than 80 people--family members, childhood friends, teammates, opponents, front office workers and others--combined with dozens of newspaper and magazine articles shed light on the iconic patriarch of one of baseball's last great "families," the 1970s-era Pittsburgh Pirates.

"Richard Pryor was chain lightning to everything around him. He shocked the world through with human electricity. He blew all our comfortable balance to hell. And Furious Cool captures it brilliantly." --Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin Richard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly he was the most successful black actor/comedian ever. Controversial and somewhat enigmatic during his life, Pryor's performances opened up a  whole new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn't just new--it was theretofore unthinkable. Now, in this groundbreaking and revelatory work, Joe and David Henry bring him alive again both as a man and as an artist, providing an in-depth appreciation of his talent and his lasting influence, as well as an insightful examination of the world he lived in and the myriad influences that shaped both his persona and his art. "Brothers David and Joe Henry have brought Richard Pryor back to pulsating life, affirming both his humanity and his immortality as a comic--and tragic--genius." --The Huffington Post "A sleek, highly literate biography that places the comic in the pop-cultural context of his times." --Bloomberg News "It would be enough if Furious Cool was a profile of Pryor's uncanny talents, psychic turmoil, and ungovernable behavior, but it's also a fascinating history of black comedy . . . Furious Cool captures Pryor's frenetic routines and stage presence on the page . . . The inextricable legacy of Richard Pryor--his boldness, inventiveness, candor, and empathy--lives on." --Los Angeles Magazine "An addictively readable study of the path of this outsized talent . . . Someday, when fewer people know Richard Pryor's name, Furious Cool will be the best defense against the worst sort of forgetting--the kind that involves who we are now, who we loved once, and why." --Esquire