To Be a Slave

Lester's first book and runner-up for the 1969 Newbery Medal. First Edition. "To be a slave. To be owned by another person, as a car, house, or table is owned. To live as a piece of property that could be sold, a child sold from its mother, a wife from her husband. To be considered not human, but a 'thing' that plowed the fields, cut the wood, cooked the food, nursed another's children, a 'thing' whose sole function was determined by the one who owned you." This book is about how it felt. All the aspects of slavery in America are described in vivid and often painful detail by black men and women who had themselves been slaves. The material is arranged in a historical time sequence which begins in Africa and culminates with the Civil War and Emancipation, but the emotions of the people who lived through it are timeless.

Julius Lester is a celebrated author whose accolades include a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award. He is also a National Book Award finalist, a National Book Critics Circle nominee, and a recipient of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. In addition to his critically acclaimed writing career, Mr. Lester has distinguished himself as a civil rights activist, musician, photographer, radio talk-show host, and professor. For 32 years he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Tom Feelings has received numerous awards for his art in books. In 1972, he was the first African-American artist to win a Caldecott Honor, for Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book, and in 1975 he won a second Caldecott Honor for Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alphabet Book, both written by Muriel Feelings. Mr. Feelings taught art at the University of South Carolina. It was during that time he published perhaps his best-known work, The Middle Passage, which won the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award. Mr. Feelings was working on finishing his last picture book, I Saw Your Face, a collaboration with the poet Kwame Dawes, not long before his death in 2003.