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New Books on the African-American Experience
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Ramadan Ramsey: A Novel
by Louis Edwards
When Ramadan Ramsey, the son of a ninth generation New Orleans African American and a Syrian refugee, turns 17, he sets off to find the father he has never known. This is the story of his adventure-filled journey filled that takes him from NOLA to Egypt, Istanbul and finally Syria.
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family’s past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.
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Everywhere You Don't Belong
by Gabriel Bump
Raised by a civil-rights activist grandmother on the South Side of Chicago, Claude McKay Love searches for a sense of belonging before a riot compels his departure for college, where he discovers he cannot escape his past.
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Libertie: A Novel
by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Coming of age as a free-born Black woman in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson struggles against her mother’s medical aspirations for her when she finds herself more drawn to a musical career that could compromise her autonomy.
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We Are Not Like Them: A Novel
by Christine Pride
The lifelong bond between two women, one Black and one white, is severely tested when one woman’s husband, a police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, while the other woman, a reporter, covers this career-making story.
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Yellow Wife: A Novel
by Sadeqa Johnson
Born on a plantation, but set apart from the others by her mother’s position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at 18 and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail.
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Under the Tulip Tree
by Michelle Shocklee
Eager for any writing job during the Great Depression, Rena accepts a position interviewing former slaves for the Federal Writers' Project. There, she meets Frankie Washington, a 101-year-old woman whose honest yet tragic past captivates Rena. While Frankie's story challenges Rena's preconceptions about slavery, it also connects the two women whose lives are otherwise separated by age, race, and circumstances.
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The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
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Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War
by David P. Cline
Journalists began to call the Korean War "the Forgotten War" even before it ended. Without a doubt, the most neglected story of this already-neglected war is that of African Americans who served just two years after Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the military. Incorporating oral histories, soldiers, sailors and flyers tell the story of what it meant, how it felt, and what it cost them to fight for the freedom abroad that was too often denied them at home.
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The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
This ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery reimagines if our national narrative actually started in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of 20-30 enslaved people from Africa.
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How The Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
by Clint Smith
How the Word is Passed is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks, those that are honest about the past and those that are not, that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
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Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
by Natasha D. Trethewey
The former U.S. Poet Laureate shares a personal memoir about the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and how this profound experience of loss shaped her as an adult and an artist.
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Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells
by Michelle Duster
Written by her great-granddaughter, a historical portrait of the boundary-breaking civil rights pioneer includes coverage of Wells’s early years as a slave, her famous acts of resistance and her achievements as a journalist and anti-lynching activist.
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