Books

No one knew the significance of that day in 1941. Mostly, it was just another afternoon at one of Harlem's elite Black tennis clubs, a club that enjoyed a recent surge of popularity in a sport that wasn't just for white people. "Negro" players embraced tennis in great numbers, too, and on that day in Harlem, spectators watched as a sullen, "skinny thirteen-year-old [Black] girl" smacked around a few balls as if she wanted to punish them.

The old saying recommends trying three times, but that can be nothing but frustration: if it ain't working, what says it might work later? Try, try again is fruitless but then... there are those days when a third attempt, or a fourth or a fifth is all it takes to get things done. As in the new book, "Trinity" by Zelda Lockhart, the third time's indeed the charm.

Growing up in a "self-sufficient and independent" all-female household that prized education and encouraged her love of the planets, Aomawa Shields was raised securely on a foundation of science and "the sky was my first love.

"My work as a historian has always begun with the stories of my ancestors," says Kelley and she opens this book with an angry man, his son, and the story of Henry, who was "born in bondage" and ultimately became a blacksmith. Kelley admits that she doesn't know much about Henry's earliest life but in adulthood, he became a voter and "he was part of a community" – something that Kelly "found time and again" had given "Black folks [a] sense of self."

For anyone who likes to watch the ponies, or who thrills to the Triple Crown each year, "Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey" by Katherine C. Mooney (Yale University Press, $25) is a book filled with action and history. Isaac Murphy was born a slave in 1861 and became a horse jockey, as many Black men did then. Horse racing was one of America's most popular sports in the mid-nineteenth-century and Murphy was one of America's most well-known athletes, Black and white – but while his work, the races he won, and the prizes he captured made him famous then, Murphy is often forgotten today.

Though restaurants certainly existed before the turn of the last century, fast food joints "took root in the early 1900s, when the earliest...chains began." White Castle, with their oniony square burgers, is widely considered to be the first; later, KFC, Burger King, and McDonald's became the juggernauts of the industry, and something set them apart. 

All your troubles would disappear, poof! One wave, and you'd have the money you need, the job you want, the family you've dreamed about, the life you deserve. Wave a magic wand and go on vacation or – as in the new book "Life and Other Love Songs" by Anissa Gray – you could wave it and just disappear.

Unless you fall into the non-white, non-cis-male category, you may not realize the amount of extra labor that women and minorities do at work and do to be able to work. It's hidden, and few  folks discuss it but those who experience it, know it.

The last two apps you downloaded were for diets. Ugh. Friends say that you're perfect but you'd like to lose your flabby arms, your thick thighs, and a few inches from your belly. You imagine what you'd be like if you...

Spikes took acting classes and absorbed as much as he could about old-time Black comedians. He built a recording studio in his home and learned to make album covers, which led him to a job at Motown, where he went into sales and learned how to make an impression. The "Black Godfather" taught him that it was possible to talk with anyone, black or white, with honesty.