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One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the...
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Kingdom County, Vermont, is tucked between the Green Mountains and the White Mountains not far from the Canadian border, a small town of proud people with long memories. When the new preacher, Walter Andrews, came to town, he was an outsider, a stranger. He was also a black man. It was the summer James Kinneson turned thirteen. Son of the newspaper owner and younger brother of the town's fiery defense lawyer, James witnessed the shattering events...
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Black History Month - Kids
CR - Color is Not a Crime
CR - Girl Power - books for ages 6 - 12
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CR - Color is Not a Crime
CR - Girl Power - books for ages 6 - 12
More Lists...
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"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. 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...
6) The help
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In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.
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The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) is an anthology by James Weldon Johnson. Alongside some of his own poems, Johnson includes the work of such legendary artists as Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Carefully selected and supported with a masterful preface by Johnson, the poems herein reflect a range of voices, styles, and subjects drawn from tradition and experience alike. In his preface, Johnson...
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"A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family. The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone--and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to...
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Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age, and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself, and the kindness...
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Perhaps the most powerful and influential black American of his time, Frederick Douglass, embodied the tumultuous social changes that transformed the United States during the nineteenth century. In a career of unprecedented breadth, Douglass rose from the oppression of his slave's birth to fame as an abolitionist
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Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice -- Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of...
12) The yellow house
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"A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands...
13) Becoming
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December Memoir & Biography Display 2022
Oprah's Book Club
Women's History Month
Women's History Month 2023
Oprah's Book Club
Women's History Month
Women's History Month 2023
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In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily...
14) Native son
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Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities...
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"Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...
16) Mom & me & mom
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The celebrated author shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, relating the events that prompted her mother to send young Angela to Arkansas to live with her grandmother and the complicated fallout that shaped their family life.
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"The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter...
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A story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families, the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered....
19) Sula
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Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the Black community and Sula has become...
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