I Ve Got A Home In Glory Land

The Blackburns' improbable journey from bondage to freedom pulsates with the breath-catching urgency of a thriller, yet this remarkable story is true . . . An invaluable testament to resistance, resilience, and a once-denied but unalienable right to life and liberty.--Rene Graham, "The Boston Globe."

In 1946, Viola Desmond was wrongfully arrested for sitting in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 2010, the Nova Scotia Government recognized this gross miscarriage of justice and posthumously granted her a free pardon. Most Canadians are aware of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus in Alabama, but Viola Desmond’s act of resistance occurred nine years earlier. However, many Canadians are still unaware of Desmond’s story or that racial segregation existed throughout many parts of Canada during most of the twentieth century. On the subject of race, Canadians seem to exhibit a form of collective amnesia. Viola Desmond’s Canada is a groundbreaking book that provides a concise overview of the narrative of the Black experience in Canada. Reynolds traces this narrative from slavery under French and British rule in the eighteenth century to the practice of racial segregation and the fight for racial equality in the twentieth century. Included are personal recollections by Wanda Robson, Viola Desmond’s youngest sister, together with important but previously unpublished documents and other primary sources in the history of Blacks in Canada. NEW: Teaching Guide Available Here

THE KEY TO LIVING A LIFE OF PURPOSE STARTS WITH CATCHING A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN. Many of us have become so preoccupied by the here and now that we've lost sight of the fact that Heaven is our home. Our minds have fallen captive to a thousand distractions. EXPERIENCING HEAVEN will help you regain your focus and your sense of purpose by helping you pay attention to Heaven in a new and fresh way. These daily readings, scripture passages, prayers, and stories will help you recover a vision of Heaven that is strong and real and will encourage you in the midst of your everyday life.

For readers of The Underground Railroad, The Known World, Bound for Canaan and The Book of Negroes comes the harrowing story of fifteen-year-old escaped slave Cecelia Reynolds, who slips away to freedom in Canada only to return to her childhood home as a free woman many years later. “Karolyn Smardz Frost deftly situates Cecelia in history. Her evocative descriptions of landscapes and cityscapes capture the various times and places of Cecelia’s story.” —Winnipeg Free Press In this compelling work of narrative non-fiction, Governor General’s Award winner Karolyn Smardz Frost captures Cecelia’s epic story of courage. She was a teenager when she made her dangerous bid for freedom. Escape meant that she would never see her mother or brother again. She would be cut off from Fanny, the young mistress with whom she grew up, but who also owned her. This was a time when people could be property, and when a beloved father could be separated from his wife and children, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Cecelia found a new life in Toronto’s vibrant African-American expatriate community. There she fell in love with her dashing rescuer, and initiated a correspondence with her former owner that would endure for more than two decades. Widowed, she braved the Fugitive Slave Law to cross back into the United States. When she eventually returned to the Kentucky she had known as a child, she found her home much changed in the wake of war. Reunited with her mother, Cecelia also renewed her complicated relationship with her former mistress. After years apart, the two lived within a few blocks of each other until Fanny’s death. Smardz Frost’s impeccable research and vivid description takes the reader through the Civil War, the shameful backdrop of slavery and the very real and stirring tale of one woman’s struggle for freedom—and her return to her former home on her own terms, despite the risk involved.

“A work of extraordinary imagination and sympathy, a journey from slavery to the mountaintop, perfectly realized.” —Ken Burns, American filmmaker Born on Emancipation Day, 1863, to a sharecropping family of black and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy never lived as a slave—but his self–image as a free person is at war with his surroundings: Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the Reconstructed South. Exiled for his own survival as a teenager, Elijah walks west to the Nebraska plains—and, like other rootless young African–American men of that era, joins up with the US cavalry. The trajectory of Elijah’s army career parallels the nation’s imperial adventures in the late 19th century: subduing Native Americans in the West, quelling rebellion in the Philippines. Haunted by the terrors endured by black Americans and by his part in persecuting other people of color, Elijah is sustained only by visions, memories, prayers, and his questing spirit—which ultimately finds a home when his troop is posted to the newly created Yosemite National Park in 1903. Here, living with little beyond mountain light, running water, campfires, and stars, he becomes a man who owns himself completely, while knowing he’s left pieces of himself scattered along his life’s path like pebbles on a creek bed. “Seen through the fresh eyes of buffalo soldier Elijah Yancy, Yosemite is Gloryland, his true home. Shelton Johnson has written a beautiful novel about Elijah’s journey.” —Maxine Hong Kingston, author of China Men and The Woman Warrior

75 favorite Gospel songs overflowing with warmth and natural exuberance, featuring dozens of southern Gospel classics.