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Perry Wallace was born at an historic crossroads in U.S. history. He entered kindergarten the year that the Brown v. Board of Education decision led to integrated schools, allowing blacks and whites to learn side by side. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Wallace enrolled in high school and his sensational jumping, dunking, and rebounding abilities quickly earned him the attention of college basketball recruiters from...
2) Double victory: how African American women broke race and gender barriers to help win World War II
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An account of the lesser-known contributions of African-American women during World War II reveals how they helped lay the foundations for the Civil Rights Movement by challenging racial and gender barriers at home and abroad.
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"Not unlike some of Ralph Ellison’s or Richard Wright’s best work. White Guilt, a serious meditation on vital issues, deserves a wide readership.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney
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7th-8th Grade Reading List
VSBA 2023-2024 -- High School Nominees
YA Books for Juneteenth
Young Adult Poetry
VSBA 2023-2024 -- High School Nominees
YA Books for Juneteenth
Young Adult Poetry
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"A powerful, impactful, eye-opening journey that explores through the Civil Rights Movement in 1950s-1960s America in spare and evocative verse, with historical photos interspersed throughout. In stunning verse and vivid use of white space, Erica Martin's debut poetry collection walks readers through the Civil Rights Movement-from the well-documented events that shaped the nation's treatment of Black people, beginning with the "Separate but Equal"...
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Banned Books That Shaped America
Juneteenth for All Ages
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
Juneteenth for All Ages
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
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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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Award-winning author Shelby Steele's essay collection A Dream Deferred reveals the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today.
A New York Times Notable Book
Through thought-provoking insights, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States—the first one being segregation—emerged from the civil rights era when...
A New York Times Notable Book
Through thought-provoking insights, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States—the first one being segregation—emerged from the civil rights era when...
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Children's and Middle Grade Novels in Spanish and English/Novelas juveniles en español e inglés
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
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Young Cassie Logan endures humiliation and witnesses the horrors of a KKK cross-burning rampage before she fully understands the importance her family places on having land of their own.
9) Mirror girls
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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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"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...
12) Liberty
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In 1940s New Orleans, Fish Elliot is a polio-survivor with a knack for inventing and building things, and his African American neighbor Olympia is a girl with a talent for messing things up, but they are united in an effort to save a starving stray dog they call Liberty--and when Liberty is caged by a nasty farmer, they find an unlikely ally in a German prisoner of war, Erich, who is not much older than the two children.
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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work;...
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"Preeminent illustrator Barry Moser renders the memories of his youth--in luminous drawings and candid prose--on his quest to understand how he and his identically raised brother could have become such very different men. Barry and Tommy Moser were born of the same parents, were raised in the same small Tennessee community where they slept in the same bedroom and were poisoned by their family's deep racism and anti-Semitism. But as they grew older,...
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The 1950s in America were a time of nostalgia and neurosis. Factories poured out goods, the dollar was powerful, and the United States - filled with the heady optimism of victory in World War II - believed that it could politically, culturally, and militarily lead the world. But the decade also saw the solidification of the Iron Curtain in Europe, the entrenchment of Communism in China, years of so-called police action in Korea, and a Red Scare that...
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In early 1940s Los Angeles, Mexican Americans Marisela and Lorena work in canneries all day, then jitterbug with sailors all night with their zoot suit wearing younger brother, Ray, as escort until the night racial violence leads to murder. Includes historical note.
18) Freedom Summer
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On June 21, 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. A watershed moment in the movement for equality between blacks and whites, the young men's disappearance riveted the nation. This program confronts the ugly reality of racist violence in the South during those troubled times and the sequence of events that ultimately spurred Congress and President...
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"The Tuskegee Airmen heroically fought for the right to be officers of the US military so that they might participate in World War II by flying overseas to help defeat fascism. However, after winning that battle, they faced their next great challenge at Freeman Field, Iowa, where racist white officers barred them from entering the prestigious Officers' Club that their rank promised them. The Freeman Field Mutiny, as it became known, would eventually...