You know you love an author when you read one of his/her books, then go back and read the rest. Leonard Pitts Jr. is one of those writers. This is the closest you'll come to watching a movie while you're reading a novel.
Could you find the courage to do what's right in a world on fire?
Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling novelist (Freeman) Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s new historical page-turner is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States.
An affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the cost of a black messman's life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese . . . a young black woman, widowed by the same events…
If teachers and professors taught the way Pitts writes, everyone would be a lot smarter about American history. Read this book to meet a cast of characters you won't forget anytime soon. Bonus: you'll learn a lot about civil rights in the process.
The free-standing successor and next novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Last Thing You Surrender, Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s 54 Miles launches forward twenty years to the fateful weeks of March 1965-from the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 7th to the triumphant entry into Montgomery on the 25th that climaxed the voting rights campaign-and the families who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history.
Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents'…
Knowing what's coming (or having a reasonably good idea) doesn't lessen the anticipation of reading the next chapter, scene, or line. Pitts is observant and relatable - just what you'd expect from a good (former) newspaperman.
Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all "belonged." At the same…
A horrific crime links a racist U.S. Senator and the candidate about to become South Carolina’s first black congressman since the Civil War.
In the summer of 1959, two black teens hoping to sneak a beer in the South Carolina woods stumble on a Klan lynching led by the local judge. One bolts. The other freezes and winds up with a choice: join the man about to die, or begin hustling black support the judge needs to advance in politics. In trade, he will enjoy a life of power and comfort. Decades later, Big Ike is about to become the state's first black congressman since Reconstruction. Instead, he finds himself in the same forest, a long rope in his fist, muttering the hated nickname again and again: Bootlicker.
