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Black History Month (Staff Picks 2024)


Showing 1 - 10 of 10  There are a total of 39 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "All boys aren't blue"
Star rating for All boys aren't blue
Average Rating:
2.6 stars
Description:
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young -adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
Book cover for "Becoming"
Star rating for Becoming
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
Book cover for "Between the world and me"
Star rating for Between the world and me
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation,...
Book cover for "Colored people"
Star rating for Colored people
Description:
"In this rich memoir of his early life, the celebrated scholar and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us an indelible portrait of a vanished America. Born in 1950, he grew up in Piedmont (population 2,565), a West Virginia town perched on the side of a hill in the Allegheny Mountains. He was raised in a small, intimate, middle-class "colored" community where secrets and haircuts were prime commodities and the major social event was the annual mill...
Book cover for "Fly"
Star rating for Fly
Description:
"Equal parts stunning, photo-rich lookbook, and cultural commentary, Fly is the story of the extraordinary intersection of high fashion and basketball. Each chapter explores the style of an era and the cultural influences that shaped it: The league's inception in 1949, pre-Civil Rights Movement, when the NBA was mostly comprised of white players who wore suits and skinny ties. The years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the birth of funk...
Book cover for "Ghost of the innocent man"
Star rating for Ghost of the innocent man
Description:
"When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his...
Book cover for "Immortal valor"
Star rating for Immortal valor
Description:
Tells the story of seven African American soldiers in World War II who were finally awarded Medals of Honor for their service in 1993 based on the work of a research team at Shaw University in North Carolina.

8. Roots

Book cover for "Roots"
Star rating for Roots
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
The author shares the saga of an African American family that extends from his ancestor Kunta Kinte, an African brought to mid-eighteenth-century America as a slave, to himself. This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins...
Book cover for "A shot in the moonlight"
Star rating for A shot in the moonlight
Description:
A true tale of justice in the Jim Crow south relates the story of George Dinning, a freed slave who was wrongfully convicted of murder after defending himself against a white mob and later won damages against them in court with the help of a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer.
Book cover for "Stamped"
Star rating for Stamped
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. Racist ideas are woven into the fabric of this country, and the first step to building an antiracist America is acknowledging America's racist past and present. This book takes you on that journey, showing how racist ideas started and were spread, and how they can be discredited"--Dust jacket flap The thief known as racism is all around....