Discover how a young girl who loved to read and write became a voting rights activist, a candidate for governor of Georgia, and an author in this exciting addition to the Who HQ Now series that features newsmakers and trending topics.
Presenting Who HQ Now: an exciting addition to the #1 New York Times Best-Selling Who Was? series!
Stacey Abrams began her career in politics at the age of seventeen when she was hired as a typist for a congressional campaign. From there, she worked hard to get into Yale law school and, eventually, was elected into the House of Representatives. In 2018, she became the first Black woman in the United States to be a major party's nominee for governor when she was selected as the Democratic candidate. Although she didn't win that race, she decided to run again in 2022, proving that she never backs down from a challenge. Stacey made it her mission to help ensure that all people who are eligible have the right and ability to vote. Her Fair Fight Action organization helps prevent voter suppression across the country.
When she was growing up, Stacey was taught three important principles by her parents: go to school, go to church, and take care of each other. And these are the same beliefs she holds today.
The powerful story of an eleven-year-old Black boy determined to stand up for his rights, who's pulled into the action of the 1963 civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.
Rufus Jackson Jones is from Birmingham, the place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the most segregated place in the country. A place that in 1963 is full of civil rights activists including Dr. King. The adults are trying to get more attention to their cause--to show that separate is not equal. Rufus's dad works at the local steel factory, and his mom is a cook at the mill. If they participate in marches, their bosses will fire them. So that's where the kids decide they will come in. Nobody can fire them. So on a bright May morning in 1963, Rufus and his buddies join thousands of other students to peacefully protest in a local park. There they are met with policemen and firemen who turn their powerful hoses on them, and that's where Rufus realizes that they are the fire. And they will not be put out. Shelia Moses gives readers a deeply personal account of one boy's heroism during what came to be known as the Children's Crusade in this important novel that highlights a key turning point in the civil rights movement.
Tough because of Mama's addiction to drugs and alcohol. Tough because Daddy is away with the army fighting in Iraq. Tough because it looks like there is no way out once you're living in a homeless shelter in a North Carolina ghetto neighborhood. And tough because Joseph is enrolled at yet another new school where he doesn't know anyone and has to keep what is going on in his life a secret. Joseph struggles to keep Mama clean and to hold their broken family together while trying to make new friends and join the school tennis team. Can a boy who's only fifteen years old win his daily battle to survive?
In addition to penning acclaimed poetry and plays, Coretta Scott King Honor recipient Shelia P. Moses wrote the novels The Legend of Buddy Bush and The Return of Buddy Bush. Humor and pathos abound in this moving tale of a wide-eyed African-American boy striving to understand his place in his family and their rural North Carolina town.
Square, North Carolina. When her uncle, Buddy Bush moves back home from Harlem, it seems like a breath of northern freedom has come with him. But since Buddy doesn't bow to white folks any more, soon he is jail, with the Klan at the cell door. Through Pattie Mae's innocent eyes, life in the deeply segregated South unfolds as she tells of the birth of a legend.
Shelia P. Moses is a National Book Award Finalist who has brought to life the story of Dred Scott, a man born into slavery in the 1700s. In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, filed a lawsuit for their freedom. After 11 years of debate, the case was settled in the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a decision declaring that Scott and his wife remain slaves. The controversy surrounding this case contributed to the already high tensions in the country in the days before the Civil War.
