Lesa Cline-Ransome

Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.

When nine-year-old Clem's father dies in the Port Chicago Disaster he is forced to navigate his family's losses and struggles in 1940's Chicago. 1944. Clem's father is away, serving as a sailor in World War II. When the family receives news that his father has died in the infamous Port Chicago explosion in San Francisco, everything begins to fall apart. Clem's mother is forced to work long, tough hours as a maid for a wealthy white family. The obstacles...

"An interracial friendship between two teenaged girls goes tragically wrong in this powerful historical novel set in the Jim Crow South. For Lamb follows a family striving to better their lives in the late 1930s Jackson, Mississippi. Lamb's mother is a hard-working, creative seamstress who cannot reveal she is a lesbian. Lamb's brother has a brilliant mind and has even earned a college scholarship for a black college up north--if only he could curb...

"In the 1870s, a Black family undertakes a perilous wagon journey westward for a tenuous shot at freedom in Nebraska"--

"In a beautiful prose telling, the story of a groundbreaking civil rights leader, John Lewis. John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama to join the fight for civil rights. He was only a teenager. He soon became a leader of a moment that changed a nation. Walking at the side of his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Lewis was led by his belief in peaceful action and voting rights. Today and always his work and legacy will live on"--

"The award winners behind Before She Was Harriet explore the story of the saxophone, from its beginnings in 1840s Belgium all the way to New Orleans, where an instrument in a pawn shop caught the eye of musician Sidney Bechet and became the iconic symbol it is today"--

"The story of Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician whose work was critical to the first US space flight"--

Examines the life of the legendary baseball player, who was the first African-American to pitch in a Major League World Series.

Ethel L. Payne always had an ear for stories. Seeking truth, justice, and equality, Ethel followed stories from her school newspaper in Chicago to Japan during World War II. It even led her to the White House briefing room, where she broke barriers as one of the first black journalists. Ethel wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions of presidents, elected officials, or any one else in charge, earning her the title "First Lady of the Black Press."...