Black History Month 2025

A celebration of August Wilson's journey from a child in Pittsburgh to one of America's greatest playwrights. August Wilson (1945-2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic, everyday voice of black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from...

"Stevie struggles to fit in at her new California middle school and is experiencing changes at home, while the Black Panthers and women's rights movements influence her life from the background"-- Provided by publisher.

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.

"From the New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist, a biography in verse and prose of science fiction visionary Octavia Butler. Acclaimed novelist Ibi Zoboi illuminates the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose. Born into the Space Race, the Red Scare, and the dawning Civil Rights Movement, Butler expereinced an American childhood that shaped her into the groundbreaking science-fiction...

"Beals' recollection of white oppression and her rise above it will haunt readers. A must-read for teens." —School Library Journal

From the legendary civil rights activist and author of the million-copy-selling Warriors Don't Cry comes an ardent and profound childhood memoir of growing up while facing adversity in the Jim Crow South.

Long before she was one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo

...

"A full accounting of five incredibly talented Black ballerinas from The Dance Theater of Harlem, founding members among them, that illuminates their hard-fought, historic, and overlooked contributions to the world of classical dance at a time when racism shut out Black dancers from major dance companies"-- Provided by publisher.

What starts as a desperate attempt to defy the white world that killed his father and locked his mother away turns dangerous as Malcolm Little immerses himself in the world of reefer, jazz, and women, heading down an increasingly violent path that will guarantee him a place in civil rights history.

Publisher Annotation: In this compelling and thought-provoking debut novel, after a terrorist attack rocks the country and anti-Islamic sentiment stirs, three Black Muslim girls create a space where they can shatter assumptions and share truths.

Told in alternating timelines, African American Atlas learns of her ancestral powers and their connection to the Great Dismal Swamp which shielded her grandmother as a formerly enslaved girl in the 1700s.