Social Issues: Racial Prejudice

TITLE & AUTHOR

Another Way To Dance

SOUTHGATE, M

Black ballet dancer Vicki is certain she loves to dance, but can she contend with racism and doubt surrounding her talents?

Black Boy

Richard Wright's unforgettable story of growing up in the Jim Crow South. The book is told from the perspective of the adult Wright, who was still trying to come to grips with the cruel deprivations and humiliations of his childhood.

Black Like Me

A medically darkened white man's record of his month traveling as a black man in the South.

Brian's Song

Two football players conquer the differences of race, personality and place of birth to support each other.

Burning Up

Macy Clare researches the history of a burned-out barn for a school project, and uncovers the destructive forces of hatred and prejudice hidden in the past.

Caucasia

A sensitive coming-of-age story about two sisters whose parents are an inter-racial couple, and the way the world perceives each girl as a result of her skin color.

Clover

Clover Hill, who is a shrewd South Carolina orphan, is raised by her stepmother, a white woman frowned upon by Clover's black kinfolk.

Color Purple

WALKER, A

A triumphant novel of a black woman's life in the South.

Crusader

Roberta struggles to unravel the mystery of her murdered mother's death and the hate crimes that suddenly explode where she works.

Dakota Dream

BENNETT, J

Determination, faith and a lot of crazy luck help Floyd make the journey to the Sioux reservation and embark on the sort of vision quest on which only Native Americans are allowed.

Eclipse Of Moonbeam Dawson*

Edgar Allen*

NEUFELD, J

The bitter repercussions of a white family's intended adoption of a black child.

Finding My Voice

Korean-American high school senior Ellen Sung struggles against racism and her own family's dreams for her to find a place for herself in two very different cultures.

Ghost Boy

Harold, an albino, joins a visiting circus to escape the taunts of townspeople and to find a place that seems like home.

Glimmer*

Sage, youngest sibling of five, and the product of an interracial marriage, has lived her life knowing that her parents separated while her mother was pregnant with her. When she goes to college, she encounters fellow students that force her to consider how she wants to define herself in terms of race and sexuality.

Habibi

Liyana is uprooted from her life when her family moves to Jerusalem, where she faces many changes and must deal with the tensions between Jews and Palestinians.

Hoops*

A young man with a talent for basketball hopes that his game will be his ticket out of the ghetto.

House Made Of Dawn

Abel is a young Native American balanced on the edge of two worlds and about to fall. Home from WW II, he is caught between his family's traditions and the lure of the modern world.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous (prison) tombs. His girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby.

If You Come Softly*

For 15-year-old Jeremiah, who is black, and Ellie, who is Jewish, the love they find is special and rare. But can it withstand the prejudice the world around them feels towards a mixed relationship?

In Love And Trouble: Stories Of Black Women

WALKER, A

The lives of many black women and the hardships that they went through are described in this collection of short stories.

Intruder In The Dust

This novel of a young, white Mississippi boy's attempt to save an elderly black man accused of murder is sharp commentary on the difference between race relationships in the North and in the South.

Joyride

OLSON, G

A wild joyride through an Oregon bean farm forces Jeff McKenzie onto the fields, where he must labor to pay for damages. Amid Mexican migrant workers, who offer their guidance and eventual friendship, Jeff begins to challenge the prejudices so prevalent among his family and peers.

Juanita Fights The School Board

Just Like Martin*

The year is 1963, and Isaac Stone's father, won't let him travel with the rest of his church youth group from Alabama to the civil rights march in Washington. When the church youth meeting room is bombed, killing two friends and maiming a third, Stone organizes a march for the children.

Keystone Kids

Ladies Auxiliary

When young widow and Jewish convert Batsheva Jacobs and her 5-year-old daughter Ayala move into the Memphis, Tennessee, neighborhood where her husband grew up, their arrival sends shock waves through the small and tightly knit Orthodox community.

Let The Circle Be Unbroken

Light In August

The story of the orphan Joe Christmas, whose mixed black-white heritage condemns him to life as an outsider who is hated by some and pitied by others.

Light In The Forest*

The unforgettable story of a white boy raised by Native Americans and torn between the claims of blood and loyalty.

Likes Of Me*

Cordelia is a Chinese American young woman isolated from the world in a remote lumber town in 1918. When she meets a young man, and falls in love, she is determined to follow him.

Lives Of Our Own

When Shawna Riley, a new girl in town, writes an editorial in favor of integrating Old South Ball, she is faced with resentment and violence from popular Kari Lang.

Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987*

This is a collection of work on the themes of race, gender, sexuality, and political freedom within the author's life and the lives of friends, family and ancestors.

Lupita Manana*

Lupita and her brother Salvador cross the border to California as illegal immigrants and begin working to support their poverty-stricken family back in Mexico.

Mama

MCMILLAN, T

Focusing on the African-American woman's experience, Mama reflects on children, men, money, loneliness and alcoholism through Mildred Peacock's life and family.

Marked By Fire*

When a tornado hits Abby's small black community, her family is driven apart. Over a span of 20 years, she experiences the best and the worst life has to offer.

Milk In My Coffee

Two people, Jordan Greene, a young black urban professional, and Kimberly Chavers, a white painter, come to terms with the attitudes that shape their identities, while learning painful lessons about getting beyond what the eye can see.

Miriam’s Song: A Memoir

Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Boy is a story of growing up in South Africa under apartheid. Miriam's Song is the story of Mark's sister, who was left behind in South Africa. It is the gripping tale of a woman who came of age amid the violence and rebellion of the 1980s, and finally saw the destruction of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic South Africa.

Motown And Didi

MYERS, W

Didi dreams of college and her boyfriend Motown dreams of steady work, but first, both of them must survive in the brutal present, which is Harlem - a backdrop of junkies, threats, danger and death.

My Name Is Asher Lev

Asher Lev, the religious boy with an overwhelming need to draw, to paint, to render the world he knows and the pain he feels, on canvas for everyone to see. It is a force that must learn to master without shaming his people or relinquishing any part of his deeply felt Judaism.

Native Son

Caught up in forces of racism he can't understand or control, Bigger Thomas, a black man living in Chicago in the early 1930’s, turns to violence.

Necessary Roughness

The move from LA to a small town in Minnesota is a cultural shock for Chan Kim, an Asian teen who must learn to deal with intolerance as well as the anxiety of adolescence and a problematic relationship with his father.

Power Of One

Peekay, a white boy born in 1939 in South Africa as the seeds of apartheid are newly sewn, begins an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice.

Prejudice, A Story Collection*

Fifteen thought-provoking selections focusing on the burden of prejudice and how it insinuates itself into everyday lives.

Pudd'nhead Wilson

In this funny but biting novel, a young slave woman exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's.

Raging Quiet

Revolutions Of The Heart

Cory’s 17^th year is marked by her mother’s sudden death, the return of her hothead brother, her love for and romance with a Native American boy, and the eruption of bigotry in her small Wisconsin town.

Road To Memphis*

The saga of the Logan family of Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry continues as Cassie comes to the aid of a black youth trying to flee the state after injuring a white boy.

Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry*

Unforgettable book of black pride and black heritage. Cassie Logan, daughter of a Mississippi sharecropper, is determined to maintain her dignity through a turbulent year.

Running Loose

Louie Banks takes a stand against the coach when he sets the team up to injure a black player on an opposing team, and learns that you can't be honorable with dishonorable men.

Snow Falling On Cedars

In 1954 on the isolated beaches of San Pedro Island in Puget Sound, a local fisherman mysteriously drowns. When a Japanese American is charged with his murder, it becomes clear over the course of the ensuing trial that much more is at stake than one man's guilt.

Song Of Solomon

Macon Dead, an upper-class Northern black businessman, tries to insulate his family the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom he shares the neighborhood. The plan leads his son onto a path exactly opposite the one his father had hoped.

Spite Fences

Maggie Pugh has lived in Kinship, Georgia, all her life. Nothing has changed until the summer of 1960 when Maggie's friendships within the black community threaten an entire society's way of life.

Starplace*

Growing up in the early 1960's, Frannie has never given much thought to the color of her skin until Celeste, an African-American moves to her Oklahoma town.

Taking Sides*

Lincoln Mendoza, an aspiring basketball player, must come to terms with divided loyalties when he moves from the Hispanic inner city to a white, suburban neighborhood.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

This classic of black literature, written in 1937, tells with sympathy and immediacy the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages.

To Kill A Mockingbird

LEE, H

Magnificent novel of a quiet Southern town rocked by a crisis of conscience.

Two Suns In The Sky*

In the summer of 1944 when Christine meets 15-year-old Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew in a refugee camp in upstate New York, they fall in love. But will the narrow-mindedness of their parents tear them apart again?

Uncle Tom's Cabin

This 1852 novel of slavery poses the question: "What is it to be a moral human being?"

Waiting For The Rain*

Tengo and Frikkie are childhood friends in South Africa. As tensions over apartheid grow, the boys find their friendship in crisis.

War Between The Classes

Amy and Adam are involved in the "color game" at school, an experiment that's designed to make students aware of class and prejudices. Now the experiment threatens to alienate Amy from her friends and tear her apart from Adam.

Wave*

A classroom experiment in discipline builds up to Nazi-like extremist pressure tactics.

Ways Of White Folk

HUGHES, L

Hughes depicts black people colliding - sometimes humorously, more often tragically - with whites in the 1920s and '30s.

West Side Story*

SHULMAN, I

A novel based on the stage play and movie.

White Romance*

As her all-black high school becomes more racially mixed, Talley befriends a white girl, who shares her passion for running, and becomes romantically involved with a drug dealer.

Women Of Brewster Place

NAYLOR, G

Chronicle of the communal strength of seven diverse black women who live in decaying rented houses on a walled-off street of an urban neighborhood.

Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

CAMPBELL, B

Chicago-born Armstrong is fifteen, black and unused to the ways of the segregated Deep South, when his mother sends him to rural Mississippi. He is killed for speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, and the precariously balanced world and its determined people are changed forever.

Zack*

BELL, W

Child of a mixed marriage, Zack Lane finds out why his mother won't talk about her side of the family in this tale of race hatred and personal identity.