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As a white child bused to African American schools in Richmond, Virginia in the 1970s, I unwittingly stepped into a Civil Rights experiment that would shatter social norms and put me on a path to learning history not taught in textbooks. At first, I never expected to look back at this fraught time. Then I had children. The more I tried to tell them about my past, the more I wanted to understand the context. Why did we fall so short of America’s founding ideals? I have been reading and writing about American history ever since, completing a master’s degree and publishing books, essays, and poems.
One of nine Black students to integrate the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, Beals faces threats to her life as well as constant cruelty not only from white people but also from members of her own community, who disapprove of her decision. Her book gives us an unflinching account of what it feels like to be inside the maelstrom. Education seems almost beside the point when she needs protection from the National Guard. Most resonant to me, Beals admits that being a warrior for social change is exhausting. “Sometimes,” she writes in her diary, “I just need to be a girl.”
In this essential autobiographical account by one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most powerful figures, Melba Pattillo Beals of the Little Rock Nine explores not only the oppressive force of racism, but the ability of young people to change ideas of race and identity.
In 1957, well before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Melba Pattillo Beals and eight other teenagers became iconic symbols for the Civil Rights Movement and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the American South as they integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in the wake of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown…
I was a book-loving Black Girl and am now a Black woman, professor-writer, and lifelong books and popular culture junkie. As a young reader, I marveled at the storytelling in books that took us into the diverse lives and deep interior of teen girls - from Are You There God It’s Me Margaret to especially ones like the five books I name which place Black girls and women at the center of the narrative. In most of the films and writings that I teach and my own book Snitchers, there’s some tragedy and pain, some blues, and perspectives that add to the truth and richness of our human and American story.
I almost chose a fifth book by an author more readers will likely have heard of (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower), but I’m going with a second autobiography, Anne Moody’s, Coming of Age in Mississippi.
Between ages 13 and 16, I read my blue paperback cover of this book more times than I can remember. It’s about Anne Moody’s growing up amid poverty and Jim Crow, beset by sexism and danger from within and outside her community due to her gender and race.
It chronicles her childhood in Mississippi to her evolution into a Civil Rights Activist as a teen and college student. It’s so unforgivingly honest, detailed, and visually rich on the page - it humanizes the history like an Eyes on the Prize documentary but way more personalized.
I think it taught me further about the value of writing very visually, the power of our individual…
The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement—a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person’s ability to affect change.
“Anne Moody’s autobiography is an eloquent, moving testimonial to her courage.”—Chicago Tribune
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till’s lynching. Before then, she had “known the fear…
As a white child bused to African American schools in Richmond, Virginia in the 1970s, I unwittingly stepped into a Civil Rights experiment that would shatter social norms and put me on a path to learning history not taught in textbooks. At first, I never expected to look back at this fraught time. Then I had children. The more I tried to tell them about my past, the more I wanted to understand the context. Why did we fall so short of America’s founding ideals? I have been reading and writing about American history ever since, completing a master’s degree and publishing books, essays, and poems.
Raised in a working-class white family in segregated Richmond in the 1930s and 1940s, Peeples grows up to challenge the racism around him. His transformation – how he learned to think critically and become a “traitor to the race” – is both unusual and compelling. He spends the rest of his life fighting for racial equality, first in the U.S. Navy and later at the university where he teaches. His perspective as someone who rejects his upbringing and energetically defends equal treatment for all races, as well as broader human rights, shows how much one individual can do to overcome the hate in his past and improve the world.
Scalawag tells the surprising story of a white working-class boy who became an unlikely civil rights activist. Born in 1935 in Richmond, where he was sent to segregated churches and schools, Ed Peeples was taught the ethos and lore of white supremacy by every adult in his young life. That message came with an equally cruel one-that, as the child of a wage-earning single mother, he was destined for failure.
But by age nineteen Peeples became what the whites in his world called a ""traitor to the race."" Pushed by a lone teacher to think critically, Peeples found his way…
As a white child bused to African American schools in Richmond, Virginia in the 1970s, I unwittingly stepped into a Civil Rights experiment that would shatter social norms and put me on a path to learning history not taught in textbooks. At first, I never expected to look back at this fraught time. Then I had children. The more I tried to tell them about my past, the more I wanted to understand the context. Why did we fall so short of America’s founding ideals? I have been reading and writing about American history ever since, completing a master’s degree and publishing books, essays, and poems.
Griffin’s account of his journey through the Deep South as a white man disguised to look Black, originally published in 1960, has stood the test of time because it reveals Griffin’s keen insight into a society riddled with racism. Griffin’s humanity shines through in his descriptions of his encounters with people of all races. He encounters ignorance, cruelty, and threats, but also kindness. His perspective from both sides of the color line reveals the desperate need for the change that would soon come during the Civil Rights movement.
New edition with a foreword by Bernardine Evaristo
'A brutal record of segregated America ... essential reading' Guardian
'An anti-racist classic' Bernardine Evaristo
In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin travelled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a working-class black man. Black Like Me is Griffin's own account of his journey. Published in book form two years later it sold over five million copies, revealed to a white audience the daily experience of racism and became one of the best-known accounts of racial injustice in Jim Crow-era America. Embraced by…
I like to think I’m the smart female protagonist of my own life. Each of the women I’ve described in this book calls out to me in some way. They’re misunderstood or devalued by the people around them. They know more than they’re given credit for. I think most women feel that to some degree. I think its understood now that representation matters. We all want to see ourselves in the media we take in. I saw myself in these protagonists, or I saw a need that these books would fill in my life if I lived in their worlds.
I am not the target audience for this book. But it had gotten some buzz, and it seemed interesting, so I read it. And it just blew me away. I’ve read so many articles that say that the more fiction you read, especially books about people and cultures unlike your own, the more empathetic you become. This book does this so well you can practically see it happen. I’ve seen this book on a lot of banned book lists, and for the life of me, I don’t understand why.
When I first read it, my thought was, “Everyone should read this book. I understand so much better now.” It’s about 16-year-old Starr Carter, who is smart and wise beyond her years. She witnesses a police officer shoot her childhood best friend, Khalil. This puts her in the middle of a maelstrom of opinion and gives her inside information on a…
Now a major motion picture, starring Amandla Stenberg
No. 1 New York Times bestseller
Winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize * Goodreads Choice Awards Best of the Best * National Book Award Longlist * British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year * Teen Vogue Best YA Book of the Year
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a…
I’m a lifelong sci-fi/fantasy reader who loves the way speculative fiction helps us explore who we are, what we could become, and how to troubleshoot the future before we get there. As a parent and active community member, I’m looking for fresh perspectives on how to tackle the increasingly complex challenges of our time, perspectives that go beyond simplistic solutions like finding bad guys and killing them in climactic battles. I hope books that showcase nonviolent social change in all its complexity can help us imagine better ways to make a difference in our own lives.
Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistancedoes a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.
An expert in the field offers a mindfulness-based approach to nonviolent action, demonstrating how nonviolence is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation
Nonviolence was once considered the highest form of activism and radical change. And yet its basic truth, its restorative power, has been forgotten. In Healing Resistance, leading trainer Kazu Haga blazingly reclaims the energy and assertiveness of nonviolent practice and shows that a principled approach to nonviolence is the way to transform not only unjust systems but broken relationships.
With over 20 years of experience practicing and teaching Kingian Nonviolence, Haga offers us a practical approach…
I’m a middle grade author, and I believe so much in the power of books to help broker conversations between kids and the adults in their lives, especially if those conversations are about things that are often tricky and tough to talk about. I love how middle grade fiction will fearlessly tackle these difficult topics, but does so well with heart and humor.
A Good Kind of Trouble is the beautiful story that follows the main character, Shayla, as she learns to use her voice and speak up for things that matters to her. The book has everything I love in a middle grade novel like humor and heart (Lisa is a master at describing junior high friendships and crushes!), but also engages honestly with the reader about important things like racism and social justice. This book can serve as a fantastic conversation starter for kids and parents and kids and teachers.
From debut author Lisa Moore Ramee comes this funny and big-hearted debut middle grade novel about friendship, family, and standing up for what's right, perfect for fans of Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give and the novels of Renee Watson and Jason Reynolds.
Twelve-year-old Shayla is allergic to trouble. All she wants to do is to follow the rules. (Oh, and she'd also like to make it through seventh grade with her best friendships intact, learn to run track, and have a cute boy see past her giant forehead.)
But in junior high, it's like all the rules have changed.…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I always love to read books that do something or cover things that I’ll never be able to do on my own, and Gray crushes that in this book.
Through an awesome set of interviews with players, Gray breaks down how Black users encounter racism in gaming spaces and how they deal with the ongoing structural problems in games. Gray gives voice to perspectives that aren’t heard enough, and I learned a ton from this book.
In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed affect their experiences of gaming.
The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably…
I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.
In this day of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” it’s easy to forget how our elite universities marginalized or simply excluded Black faculty and students. Stefan Bradley tells their stories for the first time, showing not just how African-Americans changed these institutions but also how their Ivy League experiences altered their own perceptions of America. We have a lot to learn from these “old heads”—about race, education, and much else—if we will simply stop for a moment, and listen.
Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies
Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society
Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society
The inspiring story of the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed America's leading educational institutions and paved the way for social justice and racial progress
The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight-Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell-are American stalwarts that…
I'm passionate about helping people to better manage their internal state so they can control their external behaviors under high-pressure situations. My expertise is on the following topics found in the books I've chosen: power/status, influence, leadership presence, setting boundaries, speaking clearly & concisely, emotional mastery, improvisation, compassion, and empathy for self and others. As a communication coach and trainer, I work with clients to neutralize power dynamics for more positive exchange, leaving both parties feeling safe and respected.
Improving our capacity to communicate also means putting our ego to the side so that we can receive messages, even when the packaging is not so pretty! This book expanded my ability to accept difficult messages. In the past, I’ve made a request to people close to me, "if you want to tell me something difficult to hear, please package the message respectfully." Since reading this book, when I hear something I perceive to be hostile or accusing, my job is to work on not taking it personally, because getting the message is more important than the packaging!
'With clarity and compassion, DiAngelo allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to "bad people." In doing so, she moves our national discussions forward. This is a necessary book for all people invested in societal change' Claudia Rankine
Anger. Fear. Guilt. Denial. Silence. These are the ways in which ordinary white people react when it is pointed out to them that they have done or said something that has - unintentionally - caused racial offence or hurt. After, all, a racist is the worst thing a person can be, right? But these reactions only…
