NCW Libraries

"Tough, smart, and struggling to stay afloat, August Snow is the embodiment of Detroit. The son of an African American father and a Mexican mother, August grew up in Detroit's Mexicantown and joined the Detroit police only to be drummed out of the force by a conspiracy of corrupt cops and politicians. But August fought back; he took on the city and got himself a $12 million wrongful dismissal settlement that left him low on friends. He has just returned...

"Readers will be fascinated by this young adult adaptation of the nonfiction work as they follow narratives about real people that reveal an insidious phenomenon in the United States: a hidden caste system. Caste is not only about race or class; it is about power--which groups have it and which do not. Isabel Wilkerson explores historical social hierarchies, including those in India and Nazi Germany, and explains how perpetuating these rankings dehumanizes...

The Clearwater River runs deep through northern Idaho's history. The Nez Perce tribe made its home along the river. Lewis and Clark's journey west took them through the Clearwater. In fact, the Nez Perce made the expedition's voyage from the Clearwater River to the Pacific Ocean possible by teaching them how to make dugout canoes from ponderosa pine logs. Fur trader like John Jacob Astor and William Ashley financed the first American commercial activity...

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

Arrested in the 1965 Watts riots, Richard Kelly (Cedric Sanders) must serve probation at an all-white seminary. Although encouraged to break racial boundaries by its president Alan Beckett (William Devane), the school wants black followers, not leaders. Even former missionary Kate Allison (Lauren Holly) initially rejects Richard. With a prison sentence looming, Richard meets Samuel Benton (Louis Gossett, Jr.)- "the gardener in the basement." As Samuel...

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...

The institutional life of boarding school is a common thread running through American Indian history. Here are stories of the strategies of human survival -- resistance, accommodation, faith in oneself and one's heritage, the ability to learn from hard times, to create something beautiful and meaningful from scraps and fragments.

Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe, is probably the most influential Indian leader of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the very first time and traces the rise of the American Indian Movement. Born in 1937 and raised by his grandparents on the Leach Lake reservation in Minnesota, Dennis Banks grew up learning traditional Ojibwa lifeways. As a...

Follows the adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

"Even though slavery had ended in the 1860s, African Americans were still suffering under the weight of segregation a hundred years later. They couldn't go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, or even use the same bathrooms as white people. But by the 1950s, black people refused to remain second-class citizens and were willing to risk their lives to make a change"--