The very best books celebrating African American culture and values, by African American authors and/or illustrators, from 1970 to the present.
2020
New Kid
Call Number: 740.9999 C885
Middle schooler Jordan Banks had hoped to attend art school, but mom sends him to a private prep school where he is one of a handful of black kids. No one at Riverdale Academy Day School is openly hostile towards him for his race, but he deals with a series of microaggressions, like being called the name of another black student, or everyone looking at him when the teacher is discussing students on financial aid. Craft mixes humor with heart in this hilarious yet thoughtful graphic novel.
2017
March: Book Three
Call Number: 323.4092 L674-2 v.3
Winner of the 2017 Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. U.S. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis continues his story in the concluding volume of this graphic novel trilogy, which opens with the bombing of the Birmingham Baptist Church, Freedom Summer and ends with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 being signed into law.
2015
Brown Girl Dreaming
Call Number: x 92 W8985
Grades 5 - 8. 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.
2013
Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America
Call Number: x 920 P655-1
Grades 5 - 8
Presents the stories of ten African-American men from different eras in American history, organized chronologically to provide a scope from slavery to the modern day.
2012
Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans
Call Number: x 305 N427
Gr. 4 and up. An unnamed narrator (based on Nelson's grandmother) tells the story of African Americans from before the American Revolution to the election of Barack Obama. Gorgeously illustrated and compellingly told.
2011
One Crazy Summer
Call Number: x
Grades 4-8. During the summer of 1968, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters travel to Oakland, California to visit their mother, who abandoned them as babies. While there, they reluctantly spend time at a summer camp run by the Black Panthers.
2010
Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshall
Call Number: x 92 R332Ne folio
2009
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball
Call Number: x 796 N4269
Gr. 3 and up. An elderly ball player regales his audience with the trials and triumphs of determined athletes and fans, beautifully enhanced by Nelson's glorious art. Includes a forward by Hank Aaron, himself once a player in the Negro League.
2005
Remember: The Journey to School Integration
Call Number: x 370 M882
Grades 3 - 8. Archival photographs focus on the children and teens and the role they played in school integration, with text imagining how the participants must have felt.
2000
Bud, Not Buddy
Call Number: x
Gr. 4 and up. 10-year-old Bud escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of a man he believes is his father, renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway. Winner of the 2000 Newbery Medal.
1997
Slam!
1989
Fallen Angels
Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.
1980
The Young Landlords
1977
The Story of Stevie Wonder
Call Number: x 92 W8715Ha
1976
Duey's Tale
1975
The Legend of Africania
1971
Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes
1970