Black Dynasty

Black Dynasty is a story of African-American life and ambition set in the first seventy years after the Civil War. It is a family saga about a black storekeeper in a remote company town in Kentucky, and how he exploits the business possibilities opened up by a modification in kerosene-lamp design, which he appropriates from his inventive young black shop assistant, to build a multi-million dollar family business, with repercussions far into the future. The book's broad social and geographical sweep offers a mini history of post Civil War African American life, in-depth research means that the rounded, highly believable (sometimes controversial) characters play out their loves, ambitions, rivalries, triumphs and sufferings, against a credible and vivid background. Details of everyday life artefacts, street scenes, characters and incidents from the historical record pitch the reader into the dangerous realities of 1920s South Side Chicago, the horrors of Ku Klux...