Lillian Bertha Jones Horace (née Amstead; April 29, 1880 – August 1, 1965) was an African American author, educator, and librarian from Fort Worth, Texas, best known for her novels Five Generations Hence (1916), Crowned with Glory and Honor, and Angie Brown.

Thomas failed to support them financially, so the girls grew up helping their mother make ends meet.

A self-described "dreamy" and "mystical" child, Lillian attended the East Ninth Street Colored School (renamed I.M.

[3] Though teaching was her career, Lillian's greatest wish was "to write a book worth reading by an intelligent person, not necessarily [her] friend.

[2][3][6] The plot of the migration narrative, centering on fictional African-American educator Grace Noble, presents African-American women as heroines and the return of black Americans to Africa as a "plausible solution to the obstacles facing blacks in the South",[2] five generations after their enslavement and transport to the Americas.

[7] The book was not widely distributed, but came to scholars' attention in 1995 when it was excerpted in Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836-1919.

[8] Williams was killed in a plane crash in 1940, and although Lillian finished the book the following year, power struggles within the National Baptist Convention prevented distribution of the book until 1964, when it gained the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. "Crowned with Glory and Honor": The Life of Rev.

Gilead, Heroines of Jericho, and Prince Hall Order of the Eastern Star; she also served as chaplain of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

Terrell High School, Lillian was a significant influence on local African American women like educator Hazel Harvey Peace and civil rights activist Lulu B.

[3] A recent widower seven years younger than Lillian, J. Gentry was an employee at Swift & Co. in the Fort Worth Stockyards whom she probably met at church.

After his mistress's husband exposed J. Gentry's longstanding affair with a local woman, Portia Cooke, he moved to another church and Lillian returned to Fort Worth after some time spent traveling in the west of the country.

[1] Lillian Bertha Jones Horace's literary works were lost for many decades until Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, a professor at Texas Southern University, located her diary and novels at Fort Worth Public Library.

As an African American woman, Horace's freedom was limited under these laws which Dr. Veronica Watson argues influenced her work.

For example, after a white woman stole shoes from her while she was at the store, and an employee refused to help her, Horace wrote: The floorwalker, Mr. Weed, hurts my feelings.

Horace, similarly to Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, used her writing to expose and critique white supremacy.

Horace's work adds to the knowledge scholars have of the ways in which Black female authors engaged with the concept of whiteness.

[15][16] Her premise puts forth emigrating to Africa as a solution to the discrimination faced by black people in the United States.

[1][14] Crowned with Glory and Honor (written in 1943) is a biography of Reverend Lacey Kirk Williams, a prominent pastor and president of the National Baptist Convention (NBC), 1922–1940.

[1] The protagonist, Angie Brown, is an African American woman who experiences the death of her infant soon after her husband leaves her.

One of the only interns who would see Black patients at a nearby segregated hospital did not return from an extended lunch in time to treat her child.

A devastated Angie begins a journey that takes her far away from home where she finds support from both black and white women.