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Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved married couple, devised a daring plan to escape to freedom. Capitalizing on Ellen’s mixed race heritage and light skin, she would dress herself as a wealthy white man, while William posed as her slave.

A common love of Tupac Shakur unites three preteens: two from comfortable lives and one, D Foster, who can really relate to Tupac’s lyrics.

Experience the growth of the environmental movement in poetry, essay, song, and prose from its infancy to present day through the eyes of its champions.

Bright and carefree, Zitkála-Sá grows up on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota with her mother until Quaker missionaries arrive, offering the reservation’s children a free education. The catch: They must leave their parents behind and travel to Indiana. Curious about the world beyond the reservation, Zitkála-Sá begs her mother to let her go—and her mother, aware of the advantages that an education offers, reluctantly agrees. But the missionary school is not the adventure that Zitkála-Sá expected: The school is a strict one, her long hair is cut short, and only English is spoken. She encounters racism and ridicule. Slowly, Zitkála-Sá adapts to her environment—excelling at her studies, winning prizes for essay-writing and oration. But the price of success is estrangement from her cultural roots—and is it one she is willing to pay?

Now that Amina is in middle school, everything feels different. Does Amina need to start changing too? Or hiding who she is to fit in? While Amina grapples with these questions, she is devastated when her local mosque is vandalized. Amina’s Voice brings to life the joys and challenges of a young Pakistani-American and highlights the many ways in which one girl’s voice can help bring a diverse community together to love and support each other. Named a Best Book of 2017 by The Washington Post, NPR, and other reviewers.

Ana’s life is a collection of bits and pieces of her past. Infected with HIV at birth, she’s unaware of many details of her early childhood and barely remembers her mother. Living with her strict grandmother, she learns how to keep secrets – secrets about her infection and about the abuse she endures at home. But after Ana falls in love and becomes pregnant at seventeen, she begins a journey of hope – a journey of protecting herself and others. She is living with HIV, not dying from it.

Jenna Bush tells of Ana’s struggle to break free from the cycle of abuse, silence, and illness with passion and eloquence. But this is not just Ana’s story. It is also the story of many children around the world who are marginalized, neglected, and mistreated.

After her sophomore year in high school, Apple Starkington, who grew up feeling like she didn’t fit in with her White father and stepmother, spends the summer at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation getting to know her Native family members for the first time.

The lives of a tight-knit group of 14 young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.  

Watch as Traci Chee reads a short excerpt from We Are Not Free

You go through life thinking there’s so much you need… . Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart. 

Inspired by the many Indigenous-led movements across North America, We Are Water Protectors issues an urgent rallying cry to safeguard the Earth’s water from harm and corruption.

Water is the first medicine.
It affects and connects us all …

When a black snake threatens to destroy the Earth
And poison her people’s water, one young water protector
Takes a stand to defend Earth’s most sacred resource.

Nadira’s family has lived a law-abiding — but illegal — existence since arriving in the U.S. from Bangladesh years ago. During a post-9/11 crackdown, her father is discovered and the possibility of deportation hangs heavy over their lives.

By winning the state high school basketball championship in 1955, ten teens from an Indianapolis school meant to be the centerpiece of racially segregated education in the state shattered the myth of their inferiority. Anchored by the astonishing Oscar Robertson, a future college and NBA star, the Crispus Attucks Tigers went down in history as the first state champions from Indianapolis and the first all-black team in U.S. history to win a racially open championship tournament—an integration they had forced with their on-court prowess. From native Hoosier and award-winning author Phillip Hoose comes this true story of a team up against impossible odds, making a difference when it mattered most.

In 1983 during South Korea’s Fifth Republic, apolitical Kim Hyun Sook seeks refuge in books at college and finds herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground banned book club. 

Before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, Black athletes played in the Negro Leagues — on teams coached by Black managers, cheered on by Black fans, and often run by Black owners. Here is the riveting true story of the woman at the center of the Black baseball world: Effa Manley, co-owner and business manager of the Newark Eagles. Elegant yet gutsy, she cultivated a powerhouse team. Yet just as her Eagles reached their pinnacle, so did calls to integrate baseball, a move that would all but extinguish the Negro Leagues. On and off the field, Effa hated to lose. She had devoted her life to Black empowerment — but in the battle for Black baseball, was the game rigged against her? 

A father’s anguished account of his promising son’s meth addiction and its painful impact on the entire family is honest, raw, and full of information about the realities of drug addiction.

Michelle Robinson was born on the South Side of Chicago. From her modest beginnings, she would become Michelle Obama, the inspiring and powerful First Lady of the United States, when her husband, Barack Obama, was elected the forty-fourth president. They would be the first Black First Family in the White House and serve the country for two terms. In this volume for young people, Michelle Obama shares her views on how all young people can help themselves as well as help others, no matter their status in life. She asks readers to realize that no one is perfect, and that the process of becoming is what matters, as finding yourself is ever evolving. In telling her story with boldness, she asks young readers: Who are you, and what do you want to become? This book is also available in Spanish.

Before he was a household name, Cassius Clay was a kid with struggles like any other. Kwame Alexander and James Patterson join forces to vividly depict his life up to age seventeen in both prose and verse, including his childhood friends, struggles in school, the racism he faced, and his discovery of boxing. Fully authorized by and written in cooperation with the Muhammad Ali estate, and vividly brought to life by Dawud Anyabwile’s dynamic artwork, Becoming Muhammad Ali captures the budding charisma and youthful personality of one of the greatest sports heroes of all time. 

Jazz Jennings is one of the youngest and most prominent voices in the national discussion about gender identity. At the age of five, Jazz transitioned to life as a girl, with the support of her parents, eventually becoming one of the most recognizable activists for transgender teens, children, and adults. In her remarkable memoir, Jazz reflects on these very public experiences and how they have helped shape the mainstream attitude toward the transgender community, as well as the challenges, bullying, discrimination, and rejection she has faced. Through it all, her family has been beside her on this journey, standing together against those who don’t understand the true meaning of tolerance and unconditional love. Now Jazz must learn to navigate the physical, social, and emotional upheavals of adolescence—particularly high school—complicated by the unique challenges of being a transgender teen. 

Poems and photographs subtly introduce the stunning church bombing in which four girls were killed. Readers come to know each child as individuals as well as glimpse this sad, tumultuous period while looking toward a more hopeful future.

Marcus and Eddie are basketball teammates and best friends. But when they get involved in a crime, will the fact that Marcus is black and Eddie is white affect how they are treated? Great sports action and a compelling premise make this a page turner.

Black women everywhere have changed the world! Published in partnership with curators from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, this illustrated biography compilation captures the iconic moments of fifty African American women whose heroism and bravery rewrote the American story for the better. 

When a strike takes a dangerous turn, Rosa and Jake leave their homes for the safety of a neighboring town. Paterson uses the real events of the Lawrence textile strike as a backdrop for a compelling story about the turn of the century immigrant experience.

Twelve-year-old Sora and her eight-year-old brother, Youngsoo, must try to escape North Korea’s oppressive Communist regime and survive three hundred miles of warzone in winter in 1950.

In 1954, one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth Century aimed to end school segregation in the United States. The ruling was the culmination of work by many people who stood up to racial inequality, some risking significant danger and hardship, and of careful strategizing by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Award-winning author Susan Goldman Rubin tells the stories behind the ruling and the people responsible for it. Illustrated with historical photographs, this well-researched narrative account is a perfect introduction to the history of school segregation in the United States and the long struggle to end it. An epilogue looks at the far-reaching effects of this landmark decision, and shows how our country still grapples today with a public school system not yet fully desegregated. Detailed backmatter includes a timeline, primary source texts, and summaries of all mentioned court cases. An ALA Notable Children’s Book.