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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
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Black Authors: Chapter Books & Graphic Novels (SCPL-YS)
Black History Month
Eisenhower Public Library Kids Black History Month
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Black History Month
Eisenhower Public Library Kids Black History Month
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Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Newbery and Coretta Scott King Honoree about an unforgettable family on a road-trip during one of the most important times in the civil rights movement. When the Watson family--ten-year-old Kenny, Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron--sets out on a trip south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, they don't realize that they're heading toward one of the darkest moments in America's history. The...
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"I was born in Tuckahoe. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant."So begins the now-classic personal account of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who was born into slavery in Maryland and after his escape to Massachusetts...
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2023 Bluestem Award Nominees
Black Authors: Youth Nonfiction (SCPL-YS)
Black History Month
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Black Authors: Youth Nonfiction (SCPL-YS)
Black History Month
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"Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history"--
The 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. On May 31 and June 1 an armed mob looted homes and businesses as Black families fled. The police did nothing to protect Greenwood,...
6) Passing
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"Nella Larsen's second novel, Passing, first published in 1929, is a fascinating exploration of race and identity set amidst the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for...
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2024 Women's History Month for Kids
Black Authors to Know @ DGPL
Black Authors: Youth Biographies (SCPL-YS)
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Black Authors to Know @ DGPL
Black Authors: Youth Biographies (SCPL-YS)
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Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's...
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Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity, " as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....
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Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington rose in prominence to become black America's foremost spokesman. This is the dramatic autobiographical account of Washington's struggle to succeed and prosper in a country that refused to acknowledge his existence. From his fight for an education to his founding of the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute, Up From Slavery is one of the most significant and defining works in American literature. A...
11) Hope to die
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Alex Cross novels volume 22
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"Detective Alex Cross is being stalked by a psychotic genius, forced to play the deadliest game of his career. Cross's family--his loving wife Bree, the wise and lively Nana Mama, and his precious children--have been ripped away. Terrified and desperate, Cross must give this mad man what he wants if he has any chance of saving the most important people in his life. The stakes have never been higher: What will Cross sacrifice to save the ones he loves?"...
12) The color purple
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"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--
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2023 FPPL Black History Month
Black History Month
Black History Month: Focus on Illinois (SCPL)
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Black History Month
Black History Month: Focus on Illinois (SCPL)
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey -- first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration...
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This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,"...
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"This is a memoir of George's boyhood in New Jersey, growing up with their brother and two cousins, all under the supervision of their larger-than-life grandmother"--
George, Garrett, Rall, and Rasul were raised by Nanny, their fiercely devoted grandmother. The boys hold one another close through early brushes with racism, memorable experiences at the family barbershop, and first loves and losses. And with Nanny at their center, they are never broken....
17) The bluest eye
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2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
ALA Most Challenged Books
Audiobooks "Find Your Voice" 2023
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ALA Most Challenged Books
Audiobooks "Find Your Voice" 2023
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Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...
18) Invisible man
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In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro 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,...
19) Beloved
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After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
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"At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned to distance itself from whites and the black generality, while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in 1947 in upper-crust black Chicago--her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at...