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Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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2024 Women's History Month for Kids
Black Authors to Know @ DGPL
Black Authors: Youth Biographies (SCPL-YS)
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Black Authors to Know @ DGPL
Black Authors: Youth Biographies (SCPL-YS)
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Description
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 emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's...
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Description
This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,"...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....
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English
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2024 ALA Youth Media Awards (SCPL-YS)
2024 Youth Media Award Winners
Black Authors: Board and Picture Books (SCPL-YS)
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2024 Youth Media Award Winners
Black Authors: Board and Picture Books (SCPL-YS)
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Description
"A picture book in verse that threads together past and present to explore the legacy of slavery during a classroom lesson"--
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Description
Appearing in 1855, [this book] is the second biography written by Fredrick Douglass (1818-95), a man who was born into slavery in Maryland and who went on to become the most famous antislavery author, orator, philosopher, essayist, historian, intellectual, statesman, and freedom-fighter in U.S. history. An instant bestseller, Douglass's autobiography tells the story of his early life as lived in 'bondage' and of his later life as lived in 'freedom'...
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English
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Juvenile Historical Fiction
OBD Historical Fiction - YOUTH
OBD National Poetry Month (April) - YOUTH
OBD Novels in Verse - YOUTH
OBD Historical Fiction - YOUTH
OBD National Poetry Month (April) - YOUTH
OBD Novels in Verse - YOUTH
Description
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.
7) Beloved
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Description
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
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Description
"I was born in Tuckahoe. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant."So begins the now-classic personal account of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who was born into slavery in Maryland and after his escape to Massachusetts...
9) Green book
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English
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Description
"Inspired by a true friendship, this film transcends race, class, and the 1962 Mason-Dixon line. When Tony Lip, a bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, is hired to drive Dr. Don Shirley, a world-class Black pianist, on a concert tour from Manhattan to the Deep South, they must rely on The Green Book to guide them to the few establishments that were then safe for African-Americans. Confronted with racism, danger, as well as unexpected...
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English
Description
This semi-autobiographical tale is set in 1967. A white family from a notoriously racist neighborhood in the suburbs and a black family from its poorest ward cross Houston's color line, overcoming humiliation, degradation, and violence to win the freedom of five black college students unjustly charged with the murder of a policeman.
Author
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English
Description
Originally published in 1912, this novel was one of the first to present a frank picture of being black in America. Masked in the tradition of the literary confession practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be a candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgment of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience,...
Author
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English
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2023 Read Widely: North America & The Caribbean
2024 Feb. Black History Month
Adult - Black History Month
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2024 Feb. Black History Month
Adult - Black History Month
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Description
"Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they...
13) Pale: a novel
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English
Description
"Some things just don't keep well inside this house ... The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd's invitation to join him as a servant for a white family and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household. The secrets of the house are plentiful yet...
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English
Description
"Philly native Roberta Forest is a precocious rebel with the soul of a poet. The thirteen-year-old is young, gifted, black, and Catholic--although she's uncertain about the Catholic part after she calls Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite for enslaving people and her nun responds with a racist insult. Their ensuing fight makes Roberta question God and the important adults in her life, all of whom seem to see truth as gray when Roberta believes it's black...
16) Quilt of souls
Author
Language
English
Description
When four year old Phyllis Lawson is sent to live with her grandmother in Alabama, she has no idea what to expect. What she finds is inspiration the catalyst for everything good to come. She needed a miracle, and that miracle took the form of a tattered old quilt--a family heirloom stitched together from the clothes of her grandmothers loved ones, telling the tragic stories of their lives and deaths. Born in 1883, Grandma Lula lived to be 103 years...
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