Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.

Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.

C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.

Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.

A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.

An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.

The powerful message of King’s “Letter” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is generally regarded as the preeminent piece of writing from the civil rights movement. Forceful, scholarly, persuasive, the letter rallied supporters behind King’s cause and staked his claim to a moral high ground above those who urged a more cautious solution to racial discrimination. Now, for the first time comes a comprehensive examination of King’s famous letter in Blessed Are the Peacemakers. Author and historian S. Jonathan Bass presents a well-researched account of how the letter was created and examines in compelling fashion how it affected the lives of those it touched.

Defying a court injunction against marching, King and his followers were arrested in April 1963 by Bull Connor’s Birmingham police force and confined to the city jail. There, in a dark and isolated cell, King began scribbling in the margins of a newspaper his eloquent response to eight white ministers who had criticized his demonstrations and called for a more gradual approach toward solving the South’s racial dilemma. When King’s letter was made public, many of the ministers to whom it was addressed endured personal agony. Vilified in the national media, they received hate mail and criticism from both sides civil rights advocates in the North, as well as segregationists in their own congregations. In this balanced portrayal, based on personal interviews with many of the participants, Bass describes how the turmoil took its toll two of the pastors left their churches (and the city of Birmingham), soon after, while others remained bitter and puzzled by their inclusion in this troubling piece of the nation’s history. Bass’ book is a worthy addition to the history of the civil rights movement and a vivid reminder of the passions and conflicts it aroused.

The Negro spiritual and those who helped bring its euphonic sound from the early invisible African-American church to the attention of global audiences is ably captured by Andrew Ward in his new book, Dark Midnight When I Rise. Ward weaves his sources into a masterful narrative and places the experiences of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in historical and cultural context. Founded after the Civil War, Fisk was established in Nashville in 1866 as an educational institution for Americans of African descent newly freed from the insidious institution of slavery. Within five years, Fisk officials were faced with indebtedness that seemed insurmountable. White northern missionary and university treasurer George Leonard White attempted to rescue the financially besieged academy by organizing a group of students into a band of singers to raise needed funds. Taking the lyrics of the invisible black church, where slave worshippers met clandestinely in hush harbors, they presented to the world the unique musical genre of the Negro spiritual. Named the Jubilee Singers in memory of the Jewish year of Jubilee, the Fisk Jubilee Singers first toured in 1871-1872. It is Ward’s assertion that the singers deserve a place at the table with other civil rights proponents. He illustrates that while a racially rigid caste system may have segregated them physically, it never expropriated their indomitable spirits. When they carried the Negro spiritual from its hush harbor roots to concert stages, not only did they save their university, they also manifested their people’s unfulfilled aspiration for equality in America. An award-winning author and historian, Ward has produced projects for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Dark Midnight When I Rise is the companion volume to Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory, a one-hour documentary produced by PBS, as a part of the American Experience series airing in May.

Linda T. Wynn is the editor of Journey to Our Past: A Guide to African-American Markers in Tennessee and adjunct instructor of history at Fisk University.

If flying high in the sky with ducks and digging into the earth’s floral depths isn’t quite what you had in mind, how about a trip back in time? Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad is the first-ever written account of the Quilt Code used by slaves. At a chance meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, quiltmaker Ozella McDaniel Williams told author Jacqueline Tobin about slaves who would color- and pattern-code their quilts (for most slaves could neither read nor write) as a way to communicate to other slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Co-authored by Dr. Raymond G. Dobard, who provides historical foundation to Williams’s story, Hidden in Plain View recounts an intricate web of navigation, communication, and courage. Includes color photographs and drawings of the various patterns, colors, and fabrics used in this unique mapping system.

Africans in America closes with the culmination of the Civil War. That divisive chapter in our nation’s history resulted in a new life for a race bound by slavery a new testament to the Constitution’s pledge that all men are created equal. Africans in America, therefore, is purely old testament, the painful, violent account of people forced into slavery and their nearly 250-year exodus to freedom.

The book, written by Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and researchers with Boston Public Television station WGBH, is a companion to the PBS series airing in October. It is written in documentary style, spotlighting major historical events spliced with anecdotes of human struggles with slavery. Johnson is the author of five novels and professor of English at the University of Washington. Smith is a journalist, poet, and playwright. Together, they take material gathered over ten years by the WGBH research team and craft it into a detailed chronicle of slavery.

The book begins in Africa, where the institution of slavery was an element of tribal culture. Still, tribal leaders treated slaves as part of the community and kept family members together. When foreigners arrived to trade for slave labor, they stuffed husband and wife, mother and child, into the hulls of wooden ships for the rough ride to America behavior that set the pattern for the slaves’ mistreatment in the United States. Upon arriving in the states, slaves were sold one by one, without regard to family ties.

The authors note that the nation’s founding fathers had a similar double standard, fighting for their country’s independence even as they used slaves to work their land. Washington was not the only leader who maintained a public silence on the topic, the authors write. Add to the list the Jeffersons, the Madisons. Sadly, even those African Americans who were free men gaining that status through pardon or by fighting in the Revolutionary War were not truly free. They still were limited to living in segregated neighborhoods. Their job opportunities were minimal. They could not vote.

What breaths life into Africans in America are the stories of the individual struggles: the tale of Mum Bett, the Massachusetts slave who successfully sued for her freedom, or the endeavors of Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave who endured physical and psychological punishment as he traveled the country preaching for the equality of his race.

All told, Africans in America is an insightful account of a race’s stormy immigration to, and assimilation into America, an accompaniment that will no doubt enrich the viewing, and deepen the understanding, of the PBS TV series.

John T. Slania is a writer in Chicago.

Many of the books on race relations in the U.

S. focus on the problems past, present, and future. These books are certainly important. In We Had a Dream: A Tale of the Struggles for Integration in America, however, Rolling Stone writer Howard Kohn acknowledges the problems but reports on what has been happening, often positively, in Prince George’s County, Maryland. As one resident says, That’s how integration succeeds best, on a personal level. And Kohn relates the stories of individuals who have coped, in quite different ways, with integration.

These stories of families in everyday situations who are trying to come to terms with major changes in their lives will sound familiar to many of us. Kohn, perhaps best known for his Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, writes that he began the book with two biases. One is that good people matter. Fever and adrenaline aren’t always on the side of people with guns . . . His second bias is that individual actions coalesce into social change. Those who wonder how changes in social attitudes come about and how difficult it can be will want to read this powerful book.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.