My Face Is Black Is True
Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations

Important, fascinating story buried in a long, dry, historically-detailed text. Callie House was an African American woman who helped found and organize a movement for reparations for slavery, in the form of pensions for the cohort of quickly aging formerly enslaved people. Her organization, the Nat......more

Callie House is an ex-slave who demands a pension after serving as a house slave. She spent 70 years petitioning the Justice Department for ex-slave reparations. I Saw Mary Frances Berry on Meet the Press; she really sold this book well. She had researched Callie House, a black ex-slave, for 8 years......more

Mary Berry presents the hereto unknown life of ex-slave and movement organizer House in three dimensions. House was poor, Black, female, and widowed with five children in 1890s America. Her world was one full of toil and hard work in an uncaring society reeling from the devastation of the Civil War......more