Tony is an African-American high school student and a stand-out high school football player on track to participate in college football and, possibly, the NFL. Tony and his older brother learned the social dynamics of surviving on the inner city streets while fostering their love for football. Then his brother, who is also his best friend, went away to college on a football scholarship and Tony found himself alone. He fell into a deep, life threatening depression when faced with the fact that he was illiterate; he may never graduate from high school and realize his dream of a career in the NFL. Follow Tony's plight from utter despair to a life full of hope and personal victories when he asks a Science teacher to teach him to read. God challenges the teacher to choose: Tony's life or her career. She chooses Tony's life and many miraculous occurrences intercede in Tony's life to pave the way to his victory!

When Joe Louis (1914–1981) knocked out the German boxer Max Schmeling in 1938 in two minutes and four seconds, the entire nation—black and white—celebrated the "fight of the century" as a victory of the United States against the ominous tide of Nazism. Never had an African-American received such universal praise across racial lines. Heavyweight champion for a record twelve years from 1937 to 1949, Louis opened the doors for such future black athletes as Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali.Joe Louis depicts the prizefighter's life, and the times in which he lived, from his childhood in a sharecropper's cabin in Alabama and his formative years in Detroit, to his legendary career, his service in the Army, his stint as a professional wrestler after retiring from boxing in 1951, and his professional demise as an official greeter for a Las Vegas casino. Along the way, Richard Bak compassionately, yet evenhandedly, details Louis's private vices: incessant womanizing, reckless spending habits, massive debts to the IRS, and drug abuse. Filled with over one hundred photographs, including twenty-two in color, Joe Louis is the most comprehensive portrait yet written of one of the greatest African-American heroes who used his fists figuratively—and literally—to fight racism.

The story of two pioneering Black quarterbacks--one who became the first to win a Super Bowl, and one who couldn't make it in the racist world of the NFL—and how they changed the face of America’s game for generations to come. There is no position in pro sports more recognizable, lucrative, and important than an NFL quarterback. But while the league itself has always been integrated, quarterbacking was the exclusive domain of white players for many years. When Doug Williams and Vince Evans arrived in the league in the late 1970s, Black players were often dismissed as lacking the skills of a QB. They got death threats, faced racist questions, and knew that a single mistake could end their careers. The Great Black Hope tells the twin stories of Vince Evans,an electrifying dual-threat quarterback ahead of his time,and of Doug Williams, the star of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Washington Redskins and the first Black quarterback to become a champion. Moore shows how easily Williams' triumphant story could have gone wrong and how his success changed the game and the country. A skillful blend of game-time drama and social commentary, this book captures unheralded heroes of the NFL and all that they meant, both on the field and off.

"[The dramatist] has used his hero, a fighter based on the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Johnson ... as a symbol in part of Black aspiration"--Back cover.

How (pre-Lennox Lewis) Britain got itself a heavyweight boxing champion from nowhere. Single Set Comedy Play, 3W 4M

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize “A major work of history that brings together African-American history and environmental studies in exciting ways.” —Davarian L. Baldwin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Between 1915 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural South to begin new lives in the urban North. In Chicago, the black population quintupled to more than 275,000. Most historians map the integration of southern and northern black culture by looking at labor, politics, and popular culture. An award-winning environmental historian, Brian McCammack charts a different course, considering instead how black Chicagoans forged material and imaginative connections to nature. The first major history to frame the Great Migration as an environmental experience, Landscapes of Hope takes us to Chicago’s parks and beaches as well as to the youth camps, vacation resorts, farms, and forests of the rural Midwest. Situated at the intersection of race and place in American history, it traces the contours of a black environmental consciousness that runs throughout the African American experience. “Uncovers the untold history of African Americans’ migration to Chicago as they constructed both material and immaterial connections to nature.” —Teona Williams, Black Perspectives “A beautifully written, smart, painstakingly researched account that adds nuance to the growing field of African American environmental history.” —Colin Fisher, American Historical Review “If in the South nature was associated with labor, for the inhabitants of the crowded tenements in Chicago, nature increasingly became a source of leisure.” —Reinier de Graaf, New York Review of Books

Grossman’s rich, detailed analysis of black migration to Chicago during World War I and its aftermath brilliantly captures the cultural meaning of the movement.