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Diverse Reads February 2024
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LibbyTo explore eBooks and audiobooks for Black History Month, please visit this link. Enjoy these and thousands of additional titles with your library card in the free Libby app, available for Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire devices. Or, use Libby in your web browser at libbyapp.com.
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Remember Us
by Jacqueline Woodson
Twelve-year-old Sage loves her 1970s Bushwick neighborhood and her friends at the basketball court. After some sad and scary incidents, though, she's left doubting if she really belongs. Poetic writing and short chapters will pull you into this moving read by popular author Jacqueline Woodson.
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School Trip
by Jerry Craft
Jordan and his friends are heading out on a school trip to Paris. But when their trusted faculty guides are replaced at the last minute, the school trip takes an unexpected — and hilarious — turn. Especially when trying to find their way around a foreign city ends up being almost as tricky as navigating the same friendships, fears, and differences that they struggle with at home.
Series alert: This graphic novel is the third in an award-winning series, following New Kid and Class Act.
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Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution
by Sherri Winston
Lotus' dream-come-true of becoming a concertmaster at her new school takes a turn after a rival musician bullies her about her afro. Then the school claims her hair violates the dress code, and Lotus can't keep chill any longer.
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The Crossover: The Graphic Novel Adaptation
by Kwame Alexander; illustrated by Dawud Anyabwile
They call him Filthy McNasty because of his sick basketball skills, but Josh Bell is a good guy. He's close with his parents as well as his twin brother, JB — until JB ditches him and their dad's health takes a turn.
From the swift, swaggering beats of a basketball game to the changing rhythms of family, this moving graphic novel holds appeals for all kinds of readers, especially fans of the original book or the Disney+ series.
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Clouds Over California
by Karyn Parsons
It's the 1970s in Santa Monica, California. Eleven-year-old Stevie's best friend is ditching her, her parents are fighting about her mom going to college, her teen cousin is full of revolutionary ideas, and Stevie just wants to figure out how to keep everyone together.
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Treasure Island: Runaway Gold
by Jewell Parker Rhodes
Wondering if old Captain Maddie's mysterious map truly leads to treasure, New Yorker Zane and his friends skateboard into an underground world of riddles, pirates, and Manhattan's Black history. You don't need to have read the classic Treasure Island to enjoy this action-packed reboot.
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And We Rise: The Civil Rights Movement in Poems
by Erica Martin
A powerful, impactful, eye-opening journey that explores the Civil Rights Movement in 1950s-60s America in spare and evocative verse, with historical photos interspersed throughout.
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All You Have to Do
by Autumn Allen
As two Black students challenge racial injustice at their prestigious schools, they face negative and unfair consequences. Meanwhile, their parents plead with them not to make waves.
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Good as Gold
by Candace Buford
Queen bee Casey's charmed life in small town Langston, Georgia, should have fast-tracked her right into the Ivy League. But when her dad's business fails, she's suddenly a social outcast. This thrilling mystery is infused with sharp commentary on the effects of racism, elitism, and suppressed history.
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Invisible Son
by Kim Johnson
This powerful, gripping mystery, set amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests surrounding George Floyd's murder, is perfect for fans of Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson.
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King: A Life
by Jonathan Eig
Drawing on recently declassified FBI files, this first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon reveals the courageous and often emotionally troubled man who demanded peaceful protest but was rarely at peace with himself, while showing how his demands for racial and economic justice remain just as urgent today.
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Black Titan: A.G. Gaston And The Making Of A Black American Millionaire
by Carol Jenkins
A compelling biography of one of America's first African-American entrepreneurs and millionaires details the life and times of this grandson of slaves, born into poverty in the late-nineteenth-century South, who built a business empire based on insurance, real estate, and communications and played a key financial role in the civil rights movement.
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Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America
by Michael Harriot
The acclaimed columnist and political commentator presents a sharp and often hilarious retelling of American history that focuses on the overlooked contribution of Black Americans and corrects the idea that American history is white history.
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Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
by Jenn M. Jackson
This collection of eleven original essays from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to Audre Lorde explores the legacy of Black women writers and leaders and repositions their intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements.
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Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
by Blair LM Kelley
An award-winning historian shows how the experiences of the Black working class, from the earliest days of the republic to the essential worker of the Covid pandemic, are essential to a full understanding of the American story.
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Teddy and Booker T.: How Two American Icons Blazed a Path for Racial Equality
by Brian Kilmeade
The New York Times best-selling author of George Washington's Secret Six and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates turns to two other heroes of the nation: Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington. In Teddy and Booker T., Brian Kilmeade tells the story of how two wildly different Americans faced the challenge of keeping America moving toward the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland
by Scott Shane
This riveting account of the little-known abolitionist, liberator and writer Thomas Smallwood recounts how he organized mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore and surrounding counties to freedom in the north, risking his own freedom to battle what he called “the most inhuman system that ever blackened the pages of history.”
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The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
At once a powerful evocation of his childhood in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, The Fire Next Time, which galvanized the nation in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, stands as one of the essential works of our literature.
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An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created
by Santi Elijah Holley
An Amerikan Family is a history of the fight for Black liberation in the United States as experienced and shaped by the Shakurs, persistent fighters in the U.S. struggle for racial justice, and one of the most prominent, influential and fiercely creative families in recent history, from Assata Shakur, an author who spent three decades in Cuban exile, to the late rapper Tupac.
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This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
by Kwame Alexander
Exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance and praise, this beautiful poetry anthology, featuring works from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time, is filled with poignant and delightful imagery, music and raised fists.
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The Mayor of Maxwell Street
by Avery Cunningham
In 1921 Chicago, Nelly Sawyer, the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America,” works undercover to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate with the help of Jay Shorey, the low-level manager of the city's swankiest speakeasy, who introduces her to a whole new world.
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The First Ladies
by Marie Benedict
Initially drawn together because of their shared belief in women's rights and the power of education, civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt fight together for justice and equality, holding each other's hands through tragedy and triumph.
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A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
by Tia Williams
Leaving behind her socialite family in Atlanta, Ricki Wilde moves to New York to open a flower shop as the Harlem Renaissance swirls around her, in the new novel from the author of Seven Days in June.
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A Right Worthy Woman
by Ruth P. Watson
Based on the true story of Virginia’s Black Wall Street and the indomitable Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman who became the first Black woman to establish and preside over a bank in the United States.
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Cotton Comes to Harlem
by Chester B. Himes
Himes' (1909-1984) brand of hard-hitting detective novels dealt with the social and psychological repercussions of being black in a white-dominated society. In his 1965 classic set in Harlem's underside in the 1950s, NYPD detectives "Coffin Ed" Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones work to halt the theft of thousands of dollars marked for the Back-to-Africa movement.
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When famed photographer Christina Eames dies unexpectedly, she leaves her estranged daughter, Mae, hurt, angry and full of questions. When Mae finds a photograph tucked away in a safe-deposit box, she soon finds herself delving into her mother’s early life – an investigation that leads to an unexpected romance with a rising journalist.
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Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.
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Ellis French is a young, gay Black man, rejected by his mother and with few options for his future, decides to join the Marines, doing whatever it takes to succeed in a system that would cast him aside.
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Two men return home from World War II to work on a farm in rural Mississippi, where they struggle to deal with racism and adjusting to life after war.
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Based on a true story, Harvard-educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson goes to Alabama to fight for the release of death row inmate Walter McMillian.
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Meet the influential author and key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Also a trained anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston collected folklore throughout the South and Caribbean — reclaiming, honoring and celebrating Black life on its own terms.
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(2022-ongoing) TV-PG Follows comedian, writer, and cultural critic Baratunde Thurston, as he travels to various locations throughout the United States to explore different landscapes and how they impact experiences of the outdoors.
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Chronicles the life of young college professor Angela Davis who in 1970 was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of a judge due to her activism in the "Power to All People" movement, but was later acquitted.
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Buffalo Soldiers (2023)TV-14 | Available to stream on Kanopy!Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting on Two Fronts explores the often-contradictory role played by Black soldiers throughout American history. The film weaves together the testimony of historians, experts and descendants of the Buffalo Soldiers with archival photographs, reenactments, and animation to tell the story of how newly free Black Americans enlisted in the U.S. Army, and in the process helped to both fulfill America's Manifest Destiny and disrupt the lives of indigenous peoples at home and abroad.
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Fresno County Public Library 2420 Mariposa St. Fresno, California 93721 559-600-READ (7323)www.fresnolibrary.org |
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