Black History Month: Focus on Illinois (SCPL)

"In this updated edition of the bestseller that launched Flatiron's list ten years ago, Oprah shares what she has come to know for sure in the last decade. After film critic Gene Siskel asked her, "What do you know for sure?" Oprah Winfrey began writing the "What I Know For Sure" column in O, The Oprah Magazine. Saying that the question offered her a way to take "stock of her life," Oprah has penned one column a month over the last fourteen years,...

"On December 4, 1969, attorney Jeff Haas was in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton's fiancée. She described how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, 'He's still alive.' She then heard two shots. A second officer said, 'He's good and dead now.' She looked at Jeff and asked, "What can you do?" Fifty years later, Haas finds that there is still an urgent need for the revolutionary...

"Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like...

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.”   That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.   But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective...

The long-awaited memoir by one of the most influential and beloved musicians of our time
In Herbie Hancock the legendary jazz musician and composer reflects on a life and a thriving career that has spanned seven decades. A true innovator, Hancock has had an enormous influence on both acoustic and electric jazz, R&B and hip-hop, with his ongoing exploration of different musical genres, winning fourteen Grammy awards along the way.
From...

"The definitive and revealing biography of Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks, one of America's most iconic, beloved, and misunderstood baseball players, by acclaimed journalist Ron Rapoport"-- Ernie Banks played in fourteen All-Star Games, won two MVPs, and twice led the Major Leagues in home runs and runs batted in... but he spent his entire career with the Chicago Cubs, who didn't win a pennant in his adult lifetime. His enthusiasm endeared him to...

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."

The activities of the Underground Railroad, and the Abolitionist Movement in Illinois are documented by the author in this meticulously researched book.

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey -- first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration...