Charles Johnson

A freed slave escapes his bad debts in New Orleans by stowing away on a slave ship en route to Africa.

"Charles Johnson, the National Book Award-winning author of the bestselling Middle Passage, published his stunning first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, in 1974. At its release, Black World called it one of the great American novels of this century...unqualifiedly good and extraordinarily beautiful. Faith and the Good Thing is the haunting fable of Faith Cross, a black Southern girl whose quest for the good in life comes to represent our shared human...

"Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in....

Illustrates an individual's desperate flight from slavery in the antebellum South in which bondage is spiritual as well as physical, sexual as well as racial.

From the author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is a powerful and brilliantly crafted tale that explores themes of identity, race, and ambition.
"[A] stunning achievement. . . . Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time
The story follows Adam Sunraider,...

For four years, the courageous crew of the NSEA Protector set off on thrilling and often dangerous missions in space... and then their series was cancelled. Now, twenty years later, aliens under attack have mistaken the Galaxy Quest television transmissions for "historical documents" and beamed up the crew of has-been actors to save the universe. With no script, no director and no clue, the actors must turn in the performances of their lives.