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Five-year-old Marion Blumenthal and her family left Germany and went to Holland in an attempt to travel to America to escape the Nazis. Unfortunately, their ship was delayed three months and the Germans invaded Holland. The Blumenthals became a bargaining chip for the Nazis who wanted German POWs. They are deported to Bergen Belsen, where Marion, clinging to the hope that one day they would all be freed together, collects four pebbles from the camp to symbolize the members of her family. This riveting memoir is a story of determination and survival under the most dire of circumstances.

It’s World War II and Yuki doesn’t have many options. As a Japanese American, he can choose to go into an internment camp, or he can go to war. He opts to go to war and is assigned to the 442 regiment—a segregated regiment made up of Japanese Americans.

This ALA Best Book for Young Adults is the true, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable story of the author’s experiences at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The reader will be shocked by the atrocities and the horror that she faced but will be moved by her courage and willpower to survive.

Frank’s parents insist that he only date Koreans, so when he falls for Brit, who is white, he teams up with Joy so they can pretend to date each other, giving them both the freedom to spend time to date who they like.

The story of the 1961 Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement viewed through the experiences of two student leaders: a black man from Alabama and white man from Wisconsin. Includes archival photographs, an illustrated timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, resource guide, and suggested readings.

Before the Civil War ended, enslaved African Americans sought ways north to freedom; explores how historians continue to dig up and learn more about the difficult trek to freedom.

In the summer of 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent more than seven hundred college students to Mississippi. The campaign was called “Freedom Summer.” But on the evening after volunteers arrived, three young civil rights workers went missing, presumed victims of the Ku Klux Klan.  The disappearance focused America’s attention on Mississippi. In the days and weeks that followed, volunteers and local black activists faced intimidation, threats, and violence from white people who didn’t believe African Americans should have the right to vote. As the summer unfolded, volunteers were arrested or beaten.  Black churches were burned.  More Americans came to Mississippi, including doctors, clergymen, and Martin Luther King. Freedom Summer brought out the best and the worst in America. The story told within these pages is of everyday people fighting for freedom, a fight that continues today.

America in 1982: Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting U.S. autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiment simmers, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz. Paula Yoo has crafted a searing, extensively researched examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed. When Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years’ probation, the lenient sentence sparked outrage. The protests that followed led to a federal civil rights trial — the first involving a crime against an Asian American — and galvanized what came to be known as the Asian American movement.

Mia Tang has a secret. Actually, a lot of secrets. She doesn’t live in a house like her friends. She doesn’t have a dog. And her parents are hiding an even bigger secret, one that could get them all in trouble. It will take all of Mia’s courage, kindness, and hard work to get through this year. Will she be able to hold on to her job, help the immigrants and guests, escape Mr. Yao, and go for her dreams? First in a series.

After seventh-grader Jerome is shot by a white police officer, he observes the aftermath of his death and meets the ghosts of other fallen black boys including historical figure Emmett Till.

Tanya Lee Stone deftly uses new research to illuminate the dramatic facts behind the 2013 film of the same name, focusing both on the girls captured on camera and many others. She examines barriers to education in depth—early child marriage and childbearing, slavery, sexual trafficking, gender discrimination, and poverty—and shows how removing these barriers means not only a better life for girls, but safer, healthier, and more prosperous communities.

Black twelve-year-old Shayla is a rule follower. But in junior high, it’s like all the rules have changed. Now she’s questioning who her best friends are and questioning where she fits in in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Piri, now 17, resides with a Swedish family while she searches for news of family and friends who also might have survived the Nazi concentration camps. Although the Swedes accept her as their own daughter, she strives to hold on to her own identity and dreams of finding her blood relatives. The novel is dedicated to the many people who assisted the Jews in their efforts to find their families after the war.

The day after Liyana got her first real kiss, her life changed forever. Not because of the kiss, but because it was the day her father announced that the family was moving from St. Louis all the way to Palestine. Though her father grew up there, Liyana knows very little about her family’s Arab heritage. Her grandmother and the rest of her relatives who live in the West Bank are strangers, and speak a language she can’t understand. It isn’t until she meets Omer that her homesickness fades. But Omer is Jewish, and their friendship is silently forbidden in this land.

Two friends — one black and wealthy, the other poor and white — are united by their lack of mothers, but divided by the racism and classicism in their small Ohio town.

Hand in Hand presents the stories of ten men from different eras in American history, organized chronologically to provide a scope from slavery to the modern day. The stories are punctuated with dynamic full color portraits and spot illustrations by two-time Caldecott Honor winner and multiple Coretta Scott King Book Award recipient Brian Pinkney. Backmatter includes a civil rights timeline, sources, and further reading. 

The compelling memoir of Irene Gut Opdyke, a Polish girl who risked her life to save her Jewish friends during World War II.

It all starts when six kids have to meet for a weekly chat. There, in the room they soon dub the “ARTT Room” they discover it’s safe to talk about what’s bothering them—everything from Esteban’s father’s deportation and Haley’s father’s incarceration to Amari’s fears of racial profiling and Ashton’s adjustment to his changing family fortunes. Together, they can grow braver and more ready for the rest of their lives.

Wendell Scott figured he was signing up for trouble when he became NASCAR’s version of Jackie Robinson in the segregated 1950s. For the next two decades, Scott chased a dream through crashes, health problems, money troubles, and repeated encounters with discrimination. Hard Driving is the dramatic story of one man’s dogged determination to live the life he loved, and to compete, despite daunting obstacles, at the highest level of his sport.

Harriet Tubman did something exceptionally courageous: She escaped slavery. Then she did something impossible: She went back. She underwent some thirteen missions to rescue around seventy enslaved people, using and expanding a network of abolitionists that became known as the Underground Railroad. She spent her life as an activist, speaking out for Black people and women’s suffrage. This graphic novel of story is detailed and authentic. Illustrated with care for the historical record, it offers insight into the life and mind of Tubman, displaying her as a woman with an unshakable desire to break the chains of an unjust society. Introduction by Carole Boston Weatherford.

Livia Bitton-Jackson a.ka. Elli Friedmann, was only 13 years old when the Nazis invaded Hungary. She recounts her struggle to survive with her mother, first in the ghetto, then in the Plaszow Concentration Camp (the one shown in Stephen Spielberg movie, Schindler’s List), and then while working in a factory in Augsburg.

This survey of transformative events in American and African American history is presented in an informal text and striking illustrations in an oversized format.

When Louise Wolfe’s first real boyfriend mocks and disrespects Native people in front of her, she breaks things off and dumps him over e-mail. It’s her senior year, anyway, and she’d rather spend her time working on the school newspaper. The editors pair her up with Joey Kairouz, the ambitious new photojournalist, and in no time the paper’s staff find themselves with a major story to cover: the school musical director’s inclusive approach to casting The Wizard of Oz has been provoking backlash in their mostly white, middle-class Kansas town. As tensions mount at school, so does a romance between Lou and Joey — but as she’s learned, “dating while Native” can be difficult. In trying to protect her own heart, will Lou break Joey’s?

Brit’s parents go on vacation, leaving her with her 85-year old grandmother. But Nannie has vacation plans of her own — she is going to her 65th college reunion, and she’s taking her classmates with her. As the “girls” head up Interstate 95, the plot expands to include everything from kidnapping to the rights of the elderly. This is a fast-paced and fun intergenerational adventure.