Black History Month

The first in a graphic novel trilogy based on the life of civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. (Description from catalog.)

We Are Power brings to light the incredible individuals who have used nonviolent activism to change the world. The book explores questions such as what is nonviolent resistance and how does it work? In an age when armies are stronger than ever before, when guns seem to be everywhere, how can people confront their adversaries without resorting to violence themselves? (Description from catalog)

The saying is: Knowledge is power. The secret is: Knowledge, applied at the right time and place, is more than power. It's magic. This is the story of the Black Panther Party: Huey and Bobby, Eldridge and Kathleen, Elaine and Fred and Ericka. The authors introduce readers to the committed party members, their supporters and allies. The Free Breakfast Program and the Ten-Point Program. Their book is about Black nationalism, Black radicalism, about Black People in America. (description adapted from catalog)

"In the summer of 1964, as the Civil Rights movement boiled over, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent more than seven hundred college students to Mississippi to help black Americans already battling for democracy, their dignity and the right to vote. The campaign was called "Freedom Summer." But on the evening after volunteers arrived, three young civil rights workers went missing, presumed victims of the Ku Klux Klan." (description adapted from catalog)

"Those Who Saw the Sun is a collection of oral histories told by Black people who grew up in the South during the time of Jim Crow"-- Provided by publisher.

"The memoir of Wade Hudson, a Black man and Civil Rights activist who came of age in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement"-- Provided by publisher.

"In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens." -- Provided by publisher.

Award-winning broadcast journalist Karen Gray Houston tells the story of the key roles played by her father, Thomas Gray, and her uncle, Fred D. Gray, in the historic Montgomery bus boycott, the action that kick-started the civil rights movement. (Description from catalog.)

In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. (Description from catalog)

The Sword and the Shield is a dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that transforms our understanding of the twentieth century's most iconic African American leaders. Peniel E. Joseph reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. (Description from catalog.)

Over the course of many years, Coretta Scott King's close friend, the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, recorded interviews with King about her experiences. In My Life, My Love, My Legacy, Reynolds assembles these accounts into an authorized biography. (Description from NoveList)

Jonathan Rieder delves deeper than anyone before into the King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" --illuminating both its timeless message and its crucial position in the history of civil rights. (Description from catalog)

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. At the time of his murder, King was a polarizing figure--scorned by many white Americans, worshipped by some African Americans and liberal whites, and deemed irrelevant by many black youth. In The Heavens Might Crack, historian Jason Sokol traces the diverse responses, both in America and throughout the world, to King's death. (Description from NoveList)

Draws from previously unknown FBI sources and new forensics to argue that King was assassinated by a long-simmering conspiracy orchestrated by the racial terrorists who were responsible for the Mississippi Burning murders. (Description from catalog)

The true story behind the award-winning film of the same name explores the role of travel in civil rights, the specific impact of the automobile on African-American life and the cultural importance of Victor and Alma Green’s famous Green Book. (Description from NoveList.)

Sharing stories, life lessons, and reflections on moments that challenged his commitment to his virtues, a civil rights icon presents his philosophy on living courageously and with purpose to create a new America. (Description from NoveList.)

John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." (Description from NoveList.)

Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960.
(Description from catalog)

In this powerful work of character-driven history, journalist Matthew Van Meter vividly brings alive how a seemingly minor incident brought massive, systemic change to the criminal justice system. (Description from catalog.)

In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. (Description from publisher.)

The untold story of the Harvard class of '63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirmative action. (Description from catalog.)

An intimate portrait of a small Southern town living through tumultuous times, this propulsive piece of forgotten civil rights history--about the first school to attempt court-ordered desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board--will forever change how you think of the end of racial segregation in America.
(Description from catalog)

An account of the contentious relationship between the thirty-fifth president and Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout the tumultuous early years of the civil rights movement explores their influence on one another and the important decisions that were inspired by their rivalry. (Description from catalog)

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.
(Description from catalog)

In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel. This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. He had a second identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group, which was thought to be possibly dangerous and potentially violent. This kneeling man is Leta McCollough Seletzky's father.
(Description from catalog)

Using dramatic comic book-style retellings and illustrated profiles of key figures, The Black Panther Party captures the major events, people, and actions of the party, as well as their cultural and political influence and enduring legacy. (description from NoveList)

In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their lives - and their mourning - matter. (description from NoveList)