Catalog Search Results
1) Roots
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 48
Description
This "bold...extraordinary...blockbuster..." (Newsweek magazine) begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree. When Alex Haley was a boy growing up in Tennessee, his grandmother used to tell him stories about their family, stories that...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 26
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
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 of...
Author
Pub. Date
[2016]
Description
How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
"A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of Black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the devaluation of Back womanhood, Black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the Black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this...
Author
Formats
Description
"Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He spent the next twelve harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. After regaining his freedom in 1853, Northup decided to publish this gripping autobiographical account of his captivity. As an educated man, Northup was able to present an exceptionally...
Author
Formats
Description
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nations history. Hurston was there to record Cudjos firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade...
Author
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Formats
Description
'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves
Author
Description
"The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960s-when we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justice-remains unfulfilled. As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame, the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Formats
Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic
Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.”
Margo...
Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.”
Margo...
12) King: a life
Author
Formats
Description
"The first full biography in decades, "King" mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times"--
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Appears on list
Description
"One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black AmericansWhen Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
"I have never been particularly interested in slavery, perhaps because it is such an obvious fact of my family's history. The fact that I am descended from slaves is hard to acknowledge on a day-to-day basis, because slavery does not fit with my self-image. Perhaps this is because I am pretty certain I would not have survived it." In the manner of Calvino's Invisible Cities, Wendy Walters deftly explores the psyches of cities such as Chicago, Detroit,...
Author
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"For more than thirty years, Michael Eric Dyson has played a prominent role in the nation as a public intellectual, university professor, cultural critic, social activist and ordained Baptist minister. He has presented a rich and resourceful set of ideas about American history and culture. Now for the first time he brings together the various components of his multihued identity and eclectic pursuits. Entertaining Race is a testament to Dyson's consistent...
Author
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Description
"'Standing on the stage, I felt exposed and like an intruder. In these professional settings, my personal experiences with hunger, poverty, and episodic homelessness, often go undetected. I had worked hard to learn the rules and disguise my beginning in life...' So begins C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, a story of reconciliation, constrained choices and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was...
Author
Formats
Description
Casey Gerald comes to our fractured times as a uniquely visionary witness whose life has spanned seemingly unbridgeable divides. His story begins at the end of the world: Dallas, New Year's Eve 1999, when he gathers with the congregation of his grandfather's black evangelical church to see which of them will be carried off. His beautiful, fragile mother disappears frequently and mysteriously; for a brief idyll, he and his sister live like Boxcar Children...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
"Hollywood films are perhaps the most powerful storytellers in American history, and their depiction of race and culture has helped to shape the way people around the world respond to race and prejudice. Over the past one hundred years, films have moved from the radically-prejudiced views of people of color to the depiction of people of color by writers and filmmakers from within those cultures. In the process, we begin to see how films have depicted...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
"Foreign correspondent Chris Tomlinson returns to Texas to discover the truth about his family's slave owning history. Tomlinson Hill tells the story of two families, one black and one white, who trace their ancestry to the same Central Texas slave plantation. Tomlinson discovers that his counterpart in the African American family is LaDainian Tomlinson, one of the greatest running backs in the history of the National Football League. LaDainian's...