Sentenced to Death at Thirteen is a sweeping saga of survival, migration, and unbreakable spirit. Spanning more than a century, it traces one African American family's journey from the brutal legacy of slavery and the racial terror of the Jim Crow South to the innovative design tables of America's aerospace industry-and beyond.
Rooted in oral family storytelling and historical research, this powerful narrative reveals how a single moment in 1916-a thirteen-year-old Black boy's innocent greeting to a White girl-set off a chain of events that forced him to run for his life. That brief interaction ignited a migration that would carry him and his descendants across states, through decades, and into worlds beyond his imagination.
From terror to safety, from exclusion to achievement, and from the cotton fields to contributing as a design engineer on the Space Shuttle program-this story chronicles the extraordinary resilience that propelled a family-and a nation's promise-through the most turbulent chapters of American history.
M. Lisa Scinto is also the author of two forthcoming works: Our Gifts to the World, which explores overlooked African American contributions and inventions, and Gifts from Enemies, an examination of the origins and lasting impact of colorism in the United States.
M. Lisa Scinto was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and is a graduate of Michigan State University, where she earned a degree in Packaging. She began her professional career as a design engineer for the lead manufacturer of the Space Shuttle program, becoming the first African American woman engineer in her division. In that role, she designed containment systems and authored handling and installation procedures for highly sensitive space shuttle engine and nuclear reactor components. After nine years in the aerospace industry, Scinto transitioned into education. She taught high school chemistry and physics while earning advanced degrees in educational leadership at Northern Arizona University. She served as a high-school principal for nearly two decades. Her professional life includes engineering, teaching, and educational leadership-fields that inform her writing on opportunity, access, and institutional power. Scinto writes narrative nonfiction grounded in multigenerational family history and lived experiences. Her work is informed by research, stories passed down from relatives born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, alongside her own experiences integrating communities, schools, universities, and workplaces across multiple eras and aspects of American life. She lives in the American Southwest and continues to write about race, education, and American history, focusing on how individual stories both reflect and help explain larger patterns in the American experience. M. Lisa Scinto is also the author of two forthcoming works: Our Gifts to the World, which explores overlooked African Americancontributions and inventions, and Gifts from Enemies, an examination of the origins and lasting impact of colorism in the United States.
