Showing results by narrator "Leon Nixon" in All Categories

One thing about me? I don't play games. Another thing about me? I don't waste time. In my role as Mr. Black Detroit, my focus is supporting my community and planning the city's annual Juneteenth celebration. Again, my time is valuable. I should've ignored the text. But . . . there's something about Daphne that makes me want to engage. Maybe it's the way she commands a room and isn't afraid to get her hands dirty. Or maybe it's the glimpse of vulnerability in her eyes. It's probably just her. Whatever it is in the beginning quickly morphs into something else entirely, though.

Every Moment Holy, Volume III: The Work of the People is a book of over 100 new liturgies for daily life, drawing on a range of writers, artists, poets, songwriters, pastors, and illustrators (with Douglas Kaine McKelvey both writing and editing). With prayers by Malcolm Guite, Ellie Holcomb, Philip Yancey, Ruth Chou Simons, Sho Baraka, Andrew Peterson and more, this collection represents a community of believers engaged in the work of reminding all of us that our lives are shot through with sacred purpose and eternal hopes even in the midst of the everyday moments that make up our lives.

On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found submerged in the bathtub of her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. In the decade since, the world has mourned her death amid new revelations about her relationship to her Blackness, her sexuality, and her addictions. Didn’t We Almost Have It All is author Gerrick Kennedy’s exploration of the duality of Whitney’s life as both a woman in the spotlight and someone who often had to hide who she was. This is the story of Whitney’s life, her whole life, told with both grace and honesty.

Activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass is one of the most famous anti-slavery writers in American history. Following 20 years of enslavement in Maryland, Douglass made a daring bid for freedom in 1838, travelling north via the "underground railroad" before arriving in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he would settle. It was not long before Douglass took up the cause of black Americans, risking his freedom through writing and lecturing, and travelling the globe to spread his message.

There is no position in pro sports more important than an NFL quarterback. But quarterbacking was the exclusive domain of white players for many years, and when Doug Williams and Vince Evans arrived in the league in the late 1970s, 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 first Black quarterback to become a champion.

Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small—a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

Leah and McKenna have never met, though they have parallel lives. They don’t—ever—find themselves in the same train carriage or meet accidentally at the gym or the coffee shop. They don’t—ever—discuss their problems and find common ground. They don’t—ever—acknowledge to each other that although their lives have all the trappings of success, wealth and happiness, they are, in fact, trapped.

No man enraptured Martha Jean Richards. Not since her scoundrel of a late ex-husband left. Men came with problems, and she didn't believe in happily ever afters. But even Martha Jean's hard exterior couldn't hold after meeting Christopher Lee Rose, a multimillionaire mogul. He was the father of her recently acquired son-in-law, and Christopher wooed Martha Jean every time he entered a room. Now with a change of heart, Martha Jean decides it's time she marries a gentleman, but there is one person who stands in her way: Adeline Stevens.

Being a part of one of the wealthiest families in Chicago, Jasmine Alexandria Rose has been thrown into the spotlight ever since her conception. In addition to being one-third of a set of well-known triplets, Jasmine is also the famous face of a daytime soap opera and has more notoriety than one could ever want. But it's not the glowing lights, prestigious awards, or reigning celebrity that sends her pulse into overdrive and sizzles her flesh right down to its core.

A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In this book, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level.

The Book of Virtues is one of the most popular moral primers ever written, an inspiring anthology that helps children understand and develop character—and helps parents teach it to them. Responsibility. Courage. Compassion. Loyalty. Honesty. Friendship. Persistence. Hard work. Self-discipline. Faith. These remain the essentials of good character. The Book of Virtues contains hundreds of exemplary stories offering children examples of good and bad, right and wrong. The updated edition of The Book of Virtues will continue a legacy of raising moral children far into a new century.

Philadelphia, 1825: Five young, free Black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the US. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.

How one night turned into fifteen and counting is beyond me. I never imagined ending up here. I'm a Marriage Broker, not a matchmaker . . . Especially for myself! It was always a ruse. Perception, not reality. For a purpose, not for always. Business, not romance. Want to know my plan? A simple assist, a favor. Want to know my potential downfall? Him. His sincere eyes, his intoxicating smile, his scintillating personality. Oh, and our out-of-control chemistry.

Delilah Barrett is a head-turning beauty on a quest for justice. The former cop with a checkered past has made a career of recovering stolen rare books with her private detective firm. She's level-headed, smart, cool under pressure...and entirely unprepared for her new assignment. When a centuries-old book worth an astronomical fortune disappears from Philadelphia's Franklin Museum, Delilah is paired up with Henry Finch, a brilliant rare-book librarian and celebrated academic. Their orders: Go undercover as a married couple, and recover the book by whatever means necessary.

Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of "fugitive pedagogy"—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools.

The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north.

Mixing business with pleasure leads to a passionate night. Harper Bennett’s motto is work hard, play hard. Lately, she’s forgotten the latter and has focused her time as part-owner, along with her brothers, of the hottest nightclub in Atlanta. When an intriguing client enters, Harper forgoes her promise to never date a man that doesn’t live in the same city and she finds herself playing hard to get with Hunter Arrington. The passion that has ignited between them can’t be extinguished, and she dreads the day he has to leave.

By the 1970s, the country’s oldest continuously published newspaper had fallen on hard times, just like its nearly bankrupt hometown. When the New York Post was sold to a largely unknown Australian named Rupert Murdoch in 1976, staffers hoped it would be the start of a new golden age for the paper. Now, after the nearly fifty years Murdoch has owned the tabloid, American culture reflects what Murdoch first started in the 1970s: a celebrity-focused, noisy, one-sided media empire that reached its zenith with Fox News.

The Bloods were one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families. They explored and laid claim to the frontiers―geographic, political, intellectual, and spiritual―that would become the very core of the United States. John Kaag’s American Bloods is the account of a remarkable American family, of its participation in the making of a nation, and of how its members embodied the elusive ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Detective Lazarus Dimas doesn't play by the rules. On the streets, he's a force to be reckoned with, a dangerous man with a badge and a gun. But he does have a soft spot - the sexy Assistant District Attorney Journey Ramsey. There is something about the woman he can't shake. She's irresistible and off-limits. At least that's what he keeps telling himself, but one kiss leads to others, and well...so much for limits.