Showing results for "Ella" in Cultural & Regional

One of the most important African-American leaders of the 20th century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned 50 years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle.

When she was two years old, Brenda and her siblings were taken from their parents. For the next five years she was a much-loved daughter in a white family, a happy child in a country town on the outskirts of Sydney, unaware of the existence of her Aboriginal family or how hard her parents were fighting for her return – unaware of her Aboriginal identity. Then, suddenly, she was reunited with her birth family, the last daughter to come home.

In 1931 Molly led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1600-kilometre walk across remote Western Australia. Aged eight, eleven and fourteen, they escaped the confinement of a government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their families. Barefoot, without provisions or maps, tracked by Native Police and search planes, the girls followed the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it would lead them home. Their journey – longer than many of the celebrated treks of recognised explorers – reveals a past more cruel than we could ever imagine.

This is the truly remarkable life story of the notorious Ethel Livesey, a serial fraudster and confidence trickster who became a media sensation after she ran out on her society wedding in 1945 and later was arrested for obtaining goods by false pretences. With a prologue by Ethel Livesey's granddaughter, this extraordinary tale of Australia's greatest fraudster is told for the first time in rich and fascinating detail.

It was the year 1836 and slavery was in full bloom, and nowhere was it more prominent in America than in the southern cotton and tobacco plantations of the deep south. My great, great grandfather was a white slave plantation owner. His name was James William Shine, who was born in Florida, but raised in North Carolina during the height of the slave trade market and he ran a great cotton plantation in Alabama, called the Hanging Moss Plantation. He had a son named John Edward Shine born in 1825 in Alabama, most people called him “Johnnie”.