Adult Books for Racial Equity
Here is a list of books owned by the Elmwood Park Public Library that can hopefully help educate and inform us, help us talk to our children and students, and create more awareness and understanding of these critical issues facing our society.
 
Just click on a title to check availability & place a hold in the SWAN Online Catalog.
 
Fiction & Nonfiction for Adults
The New Jim Crow : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander

Argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou

A distinguished African-American poet recalls the anguish of her Arkansas childhood and her adolescence in northern slums.
American Prison : a reporter's undercover journey into the business of punishment
by Shane Bauer

The National Magazine Award-winning investigative journalist and co-author of A Sliver of Light draws on his experiences working in a Louisiana private prison to connect today's brutal for-profit prison system to the Civil War-era mass incarcerations of African-American workers.
Between the World and Me : Notes on the First 150 Years in America
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Told through the author's own evolving understanding of the subject over the course of his life comes a bold and personal investigation into America's racial history and its contemporary echoes. 
Tears We Cannot Stop : a sermon to white America
by Michael Eric Dyson

A call for change in the United States argues that racial progress can only be achieved after facing difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, and discounted.
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston

Featuring a new introduction by Edwidge Danticat, this new edition of the much-celebrated novel--first published in 1937--follows African-American Janie Crawford on her search for love and happiness in the 1930s.
Good Talk : a memoir in conversations
by Mira Jacob

The author of the critically acclaimed The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing presents an intimate graphic memoir about American identity as it has shaped his interracial family in the aftermath of the 2016 elections.
An American Marriage : a novel
by Tayari Jones

When her new husband is arrested and imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising artist takes comfort in a longtime friendship only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband's sentence is suddenly overturned. By the author of Silver Sparrow.
How to Be an Antiracist
by Ibram X Kendi

Combines ethics, history, law, and science with a personal narrative to describe how to move beyond the awareness of racism and contribute to making society just and equitable.
Heavy : an American memoir
by Kiese Laymon

An essayist and novelist explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.
March. Book one
by John Lewis

A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

Relates the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes, and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.
So You Want to Talk About Race
by Ijeoma Oluo

A Seattle-based writer, editor and speaker tackles the sensitive, hyper-charged racial landscape in current America, discussing the issues of privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word.
Citizen : an American lyric
by Claudia Rankine

Collects essays, poetry, and images that expose the racial tensions in twenty-first century life, highlighting the slights, slips of the tongue, and intentional offensives that pervade the home, school, and popular media.
Me and White Supremacy : combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor
by Layla F Saad

The host of the “Good Ancestor” podcast presents an updated and expanded edition of the Instagram challenge that launched a cultural movement about taking responsibility for first-person racism to stop unconsciously inflicting pain on others.
Sing, Unburied, Sing : a novel
by Jesmyn Ward

Living with his grandparents and sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his mother's addictions and his grandmother's cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.
The Warmth of Other Suns : the epic story of America's great migration
by Isabel Wilkerson

In an epic history covering the period from the end of World War I through the 1970s, a Pulitzer Prize winner chronicles the decades-long migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West through the stories of three individuals and their families. Reprint. A best-selling book. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Red at the Bone
by Jacqueline Woodson

As Melody celebrates a coming of age ceremony at her grandparents’ house in 2001 Brooklyn, her family remembers 1985, when Melody’s own mother prepared for a similar party that never took place in this novel about different social classes.