Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland, 1818. He was separated from his mother as a baby and lived with his grandmother up to the age of eight, when he was sent to live as a house servant, a field hand and then a ship caulker. He escaped to New York in 1838 and seven years later published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an autobiography of his life as a slave, which became an instant bestseller.

Douglass rose to fame as a powerful orator and spent the rest of his life campaigning for equality. He became a national leader of the abolitionist movement, a consultant to Abraham Lincoln in the civil rights movement and a passionate supporter of the women’s rights movement. He died in 1895.

James Smith is the world's fastest-growing online PT. Honest, unapologetic and outspoken, yet erudite, authentic and endlessly passionate about exposing the toxic myths within diet culture, and committed to helping people to reach their goals and make positive change for good.

Not a Diet Book is his first book.

Sojourner Truth (c.1797 - 1883) was born into slavery in New York State. In 1826, she escaped with her young daughter, leaving two of her other children behind. When her son was later illegally sold to a slave owner in Alabama she sued for his return, becoming one of the first black women to successfully challenge a white man in an American court. She spent the rest of her life campaigning for abolition, equal rights and universal suffrage, and found fame as a reformer and public speaker. Her memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, is published in Penguin Classics.

Timothy Thomas Fortune was one of the most influential Black thinkers of late 19th-century America. Born into slavery in 1856, Fortune came of age during Reconstruction and by the 1880s he had emerged as an uncompromising advocate of full racial and economic equality in the United States. He was the founder, editor, and owner of the influential newspaper The New York Age.

Fortune helped found the National Afro-American League, one of the earliest equal rights organizations in the United States, which played a vital role in setting the stage for the Niagra Movement and the NAACP. His work has influenced generations of Civil Rights advocates. He lived in New York City and Red Bank, New Jersey, and died in 1928 at the age of seventy-one in Philadelphia. His house in Red Bank, New Jersey, is a designated National Historic Landmark and now houses the T. Thomas Fortune Foundation and Cultural Center.

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, 1871. He trained in music and in 1901 moved to New York with his brother John; together they wrote around two hundred songs for Broadway. His first book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912, was not a great success until he reissued it in his own name in 1927.

In that time he established his reputation as a writer and became known in the Harlem Renaissance for his poems and for collating anthologies of poems by other black writers. Through his work as a civil rights activist he became the first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. He died in 1938.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated African American poets. She was Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, a National Women's Hall of Fame inductee, and a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. She received fifty honorary degrees. Her other books include A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.

Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms. He is the author of two previous New York Times bestselling books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Michelle. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.