Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa into the Twenty-First Century 2019

This collectible book by distinguished public historian Velma Maia Thomas offers an intimate look at black history in America with exclusive accounts, photographs, and interactive and removable artifacts.

Presented in three parts—Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children, and We Shall Not Be Moved—the history comes to life through 5 interactive items attached to the pages throughout, along with 10 more pieces of removable memorabilia contained in an envelope at the back.

Lest We Forget. Based on materials from the nationally acclaimed Black Holocaust Exhibit, Lest We Forget documents the plight of an estimated 100 million Africans, from their rich pre-slavery culture to their enslavement in a foreign land. This collection of stirring historic papers, memoirs, personal effects, and photographs presented alongside moving commentary chronicles the unyielding strength of a people who refused to be broken.

Freedom’s Children. Taste the sweetness of freedom and the bitter struggle for equality through the documents that impacted the lives of an entire race. Freedom’s Children vividly presents the heart-wrenching and inspiring account of freedmen and freedwomen during Reconstruction and into the twentieth century.

We Shall Not Be Moved. Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans would trouble the waters of America—agitating, challenging, and defying the status quo. We Shall Not Be Moved chronicles the struggles and triumphs of African Americans leading up to and during the Civil Rights Movement. Feel the strength of those entrenched in the fight for justice up through the twenty-first century in an afterword that includes the election of America's first African American president and the beginning of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Make a personal connection with black history as you unfold a receipt for a five-year-old girl sold for one cent, hold a freed slave's manumission papers, flip through a deposit book for a savings account at the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, read a letter home from one of the first black army nurses sent overseas during WWII, and open a list of rules for lunch counter sit-ins distributed by a Nashville student in 1960. A foldout timeline gives a chronology of the African American history and experience. The additional removable replica artifacts allow you to hold in your hand:

• Rosa Parks's fingerprints

• A slave receipt

• FBI poster for one of the most high-profile cases of the civil rights movement

• A telegram to the White House from famed baseball player and activist Jackie Robinson

• A newspaper from 1857

• A Black Panther Party poster

• And more

With this richly designed and illustrated book, take an intimate, tangible, and unforgettable journey through more than 400 years of black history.