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ALA 2019-2020 Top Banned Books
Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
High School Project Lit Titles
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Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
High School Project Lit Titles
More Lists...
Description
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...
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Banned Books That Shaped America
Black History Month 23
Juneteenth for All Ages
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
Black History Month 23
Juneteenth for All Ages
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
Description
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an American Black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a Black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly...
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English
Description
"A novel about past mistakes and betrayals that ripple throughout generations, The Guest Book examines not just a privileged American family, but a privileged America. It is a literary triumph. The Guest Book follows three generations of a powerful American family, a family that "used to run the world." And when the novel begins in 1935, they still do. Kitty and Ogden Milton appear to have everything--perfect children, good looks, a love everyone...
4) Take my hand
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English
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Description
"Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench. Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help...
5) To paradise
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Description
Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by their reckonings with the qualities that make us human--fear, love, shame, need, and loneliness.
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a...
6) The sellout
Author
Language
English
Description
"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...
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English
Description
"It's 1967, and eleven-year-old Ellis Earl Brown has big dreams. He's going to grow up to be a teacher or a lawyer--or maybe both--and live in a big brick house in town. There'll always be enough food in the icebox, and his mama won't have to run herself ragged looking for work as a maid in order to support Ellis Earl and his eight siblings and niece, Vera. So Ellis Earl applies himself at school, soaking up the lessons that Mr. Foster teaches his...
10) Selma
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English
Description
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historical struggle to secure voting rights for all people. A dangerous and terrifying campaign that culminated with an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1964.
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Description
When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever." The story tells of a Black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances...
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Description
When his poor sharecropper father is killed in an accident and leaves the family in debt, twelve-year-old Little Charlie agrees to accompany fearsome plantation overseer Cap'n Buck north in pursuit of people who have stolen from him; Cap'n Buck tells Little Charlie that his father's debt will be cleared when the fugitives are captured, which seems like a good deal until Little Charlie comes face-to-face with the people he is chasing.
Author
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English
Description
"Cassie Logan, first met in Song of the Trees and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world, a journey that takes her from the Logan family home in Toledo to California and Colorado, then on to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, home to Mississippi to be part of the voter registration drive of the 1960s. She is witness to the now-historic events of the century: the Great Migration north, the relentless...
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Language
English
Description
"When the body of Jamal Cousin, president of the preeminent black fraternity at Florida's flagship university, is discovered hogtied in the stygian swamps of the Suwanee River, his death sets off a firestorm. And when a fellow student, Mark Towson, the president of a prominent white fraternity, is accused of the crime, the fire threatens to rage out of control. Contending with rising political tensions, racial unrest, and a sensational media, Towson's...
15) Mirror girls
Author
Language
English
Description
Biracial twin sisters--one who presents as black and the other as white--are determined to put the ghosts of the past to rest and to uncover the truth behind their parents' murders in the Jim Crow South.
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English
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Description
"Race Cars is a children's book about white privilege created to help facilitate tough conversations with their kids about race, privilege and oppression. It tells the story of two best friends, a white car and a black car, that have different experiences and face different rules while entering the same race. This book is important because as early as 6 months, a baby's brain can notice race-based differences, by ages 2 to 4, children can internalize...
17) Devils within
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Description
Nate was eight the first time he stabbed someone; he was eleven when he earned his red laces-a prize for spilling blood for "the cause." And he was fourteen when he murdered his father (and the leader of The Fort, a notorious white supremacist compound) in self-defense, landing in a treatment center while the state searched for his next of kin. Now, in the custody of an uncle he never knew existed, who wants nothing to do with him, enrolled in school...
Author
Language
English
Description
Both a satire of the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 60s and a serious attempt to focuses on the issue of black militancy.
"A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy. Dan Freeman, the "spook who sat by the door," is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage...