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Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 30
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Description
Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
Author
Pub. Date
[2001]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 13
Description
"Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been 'critically acclaimed.' He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited 'some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.' Meanwhile, Monk struggles...
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 371
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Formats
Description
"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 16
Description
In a small Florida town, a young lawyer is shot to death. A young black man, a former client, named Quincy Miller is charged and convicted. For 22 years, Miller maintains his innocence from inside prison. Finally, Guardian Ministries takes on Miller's case, but the Episcopal minister in charge gets more than he bargained for as powerful people do not want Miller exonerated.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 11
Description
"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...
8) Native son
Author
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Description
Bigger, a young black man in Chicago, kills his first victim in a moment of panic. He then goes on to kill again. The book describes the feelings of freedom and identity Bigger gains from these acts.
Author
Pub. Date
[1998?], c1965
Description
Discover the debut novel of James Lee Burke, before the creation of his now-famous Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux , as he weaves together the struggles of three very different men. Toussaint Boudreaux, a black docker in New Orleans, puts up with his co-workers' racism because he has to, and moonlights as a prize-fighter in the hope of a better life-but the only break he gets lands him in penal servitude. J.P. Winfield, a hick with a...
Author
Pub. Date
2009
Description
In this classic novel from the Harlem Renaissance, a biracial musician living in the Jim Crow era chooses to pass as white and deals with the consequences.
First published in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex—Colored Man is the story of an unnamed, light-skinned, biracial narrator born in a small Georgia town, during the years following the Civil War. He knows nothing about race, until he and his Black mother move to Connecticut and an episode at...
Author
Series
Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mysteries volume 3
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.8 - AR Pts: 15
Description
Set in 1885 in an Old West culture of bad whiskey, low morals and high adventure, the story follows four men on a collision course with a destiny they neither expect nor welcome. Ex-slave Honey Boutrille runs a New Orleans bordello called the House of Rest for Weary Boatmen. When he kills a white man for mutilating one of his girls, Honey must flee west to escape the hangman. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, former Civil War bushwhacker Twice Emerson,...
Author
Description
In 1863, as the War Between the States creeps inevitably toward its bloody conclusion, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson ventures west into unknown territory with this wife, Mary, and their three children, searching for a life and a future. But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to find his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest...
Author
Series
Easy Rawlins mysteries volume 7
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 11
Formats
Description
Easy Rawlins is out of the investigation business and as far away from crime as a black man can be in 1960s Los Angeles. But living around desperate men means life gets complicated sometimes. When an old friend gets in enough trouble to ask for Easy's help, he finds he can't refuse.
16) Blonde Faith
Author
Series
Easy Rawlins mysteries volume 11
Formats
Description
Easy Rawlins comes home to find that a friend has left his daughter at Easy's house without so much as a note. Easy's closest friend, the man known as Mouse, has disappeared too. Mouse's wife tells Easy that he is wanted for murder. Worst of all, Easy's longtime lover tells him that she plans to marry another man.
17) Jasper, Texas
Author
Pub. Date
[2004], c2003
Description
June 1998, in the sleepy town of Jasper, TX, three young, self-styled white supremacists overpower a 49-year-old black man named James Byrd Jr., chain him to the back of their pickup, and literally drag him to death. As the frenzy of the media continues, the relationship between the white and black residents of Jasper is severely strained. Two decent men are at the center of the investigation: R.C. Horn, the first black mayor of Jasper, and Billy...
18) Strivers row
Author
Series
City of fire trilogy volume 3
Pub. Date
[2006]
Description
"Harlem is a never-ending carnival. Soldiers and sailors, hustlers and glamour girls fill its streets, looking for excitement. Every night, dance halls like the Savoy Ballroom are filled with frenzied jitterbuggers, and the best jazz musicians in the world face off in rent parties and clubs such as Small's Paradise. Yet underneath the glitter, Harlem's black residents remain second-class citizens, shut out of most jobs, charged double the rents of...
Author
Description
From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in America
For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 7.6 - AR Pts: 2
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Among these biographies, readers will find aviators and artists, politicians and pop stars, athletes and activists. The exceptional men featured include artist Aaron Douglas, civil rights leader John Lewis, dancer Alvin Ailey, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, musician Prince, photographer Gordon Parks, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and writer James Baldwin. The legends in this book span centuries and continents, but what they have in common is that each one...