The Breakthrough by Gwen Ifil

Veteran journalist Gwen Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation.

Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

The Black Girl Next Door by Jennifer Baszile

At six years of age, after winning a foot race against a white classmate, Jennifer Baszile was humiliated to hear her classmate explain that black people "have something in their feet to make them run faster than white people." When she asked her teacher about it, it was confirmed as true. The next morning, Jennifer's father accompanied her to school, careful to "assert himself as an informed and concerned parent and not simply a big, black, dangerous man in a first-grade classroom."

This was the first of many skirmishes in Jennifer's childhood-long struggle to define herself as "the black girl next door" while living out her parents' dreams. Success for her was being the smartest and achieving the most, with the consequence that much of her girlhood did not seem like her own but more like the "family project." But integration took a toll on everyone in the family when strain in her parents' marriage emerged in her teenage years, and the struggle to be the perfect black family became an unbearable burden.

We Take This Man by Candice Dow

Dwight and Tracey Wilson are living the ideal life with their two children in a brand new home in Florida. They are both excited when Dwight is offered a promotion at work, but the downside is that the job is located in Maryland. After much discussion, Tracey decides that she does not want to leave their new house. Dwight makes the decision to accept the position and return home on weekends.

Alicia Dixon has spent her life hating and not trusting men after her father mistreated her mother, but she can't help but fall for the new guy in her company...Dwight. They both try to fight their attraction to one another, but it proves to be a losing battle-Alicia is everything that his southern wife is not.

When Alicia ends up pregnant, Dwight decides to end things with Tracey, but the process proves not to be as easy as Dwight had hoped.

The Best of Everything by Kimberla Lawson Roby

Alicia Black Sullivan swore to never repeat her father's mistakes: she would never break any promises, she would never be unfaithful. And most important of all, when she got married, it would be for good.

And she really does love Phillip, the assistant pastor of her father's church. She just happens to love money—and the things it can buy—as well. Alicia was born to the good life, she's entitled to the best, and she'll do anything to get it. Even if it means piling up thousands of dollars in debt. Even if it means denying to everyone—even herself—that her love of shopping has gotten way out of control.

Before long, Phillip begins to wonder if marrying the woman of his dreams was a huge mistake. Alicia has similar thoughts. Deep down, though, she knows a whopper of an emotional bill is coming due. And all the regrets in the world won't change the fact that she may be more like her infamous father than she could have imagined—or feared.

Up to No Good by Carl Weber

There is always a man around the corner. And church trustee James Black should know—he’s usually that very man, carrying on affairs with married women and sleeping with one conquest after another. He has charm and good looks, and he knows how to use them. But when the tables turn and he suddenly finds himself in love with the woman of his dreams, he’s not the only one who’s surprised. And his marriage proposal quickly generates a ripple effect of shocking proportions...

The other women in James’s neighborhood have a thing or two to say about James’s new love. His daughter Jamie, only six months younger than his new fiancé, has every intention of dismantling his new relationship. But her plate becomes full when she discovers a mystery woman has been secretly calling her lover, Louis.

James’s son Darnel always swore he would not grow up to become a player like his father. His life is the picture of monogamy and devotion—until he catches his fiancée cheating and decides to follow in his father’s womanizing footsteps.

James knows he’s largely to blame for the turmoil that surrounds him and his loved ones. And now he’s going to have to find a way to bring peace to his loved one’s lives. But the only way he can do this is by facing some hard truths about himself and changing his own scandalous ways.

Basketball Jones by E. Lynn Harris

Aldridge James “AJ” Richardson is living the good life. He has a gorgeous town house in always-flavorful New Orleans, plenty of frequent-flier miles from jet-setting around the country on a whim, and an MBA—but he’s never had to work a regular job. He owes it all to his longtime lover, Dray Jones. Dray Jones the rich and famous NBA star. They fell in love in college when AJ was hired to tutor Dray, a freshman on the basketball team.

But Dray knew if he wanted to make it to the big time, he must juggle his public image and his private desires. Built on a deep, abiding love, their hidden relationship sustains them both, but when Dray’s teammates begin to ask insinuating questions about AJ, Dray puts their doubts to rest by marrying Judi, a beautiful and ambitious woman. Judi knows nothing about Dray’s “other life.” Or does she?

Freeman Walker by David Allan Cates

At the age of seven a mulatto slave boy with an indomitable spirit, Jimmy Gates, is freed by his owner-father, separated from his mother and everything he holds dear, and sent to England for an education. Four years later when his father drowns at sea, leaving him bereft, Jimmy is apprenticed to a London workhouse where he spends six hard years making saddles, reading heroic novels to his companions, finding the comfort of prostitutes, and discovering the inspirational speeches of an Irish revolutionary name Cornelius O Keefe, or O Keefe of the Sword.

At eighteen, dreaming himself a warrior and a hero, he returns to the states intending to rescue his mother. Both blessed and cursed by his late father s words-to-live-by and armed with his free papers and a copy of the Declaration of Independence, Jimmy grows into manhood while he s on the battlefields of the Civil War and in the gold camps of the American West, repeatedly forced to reckon the joys, terrors, and ironies of his freedom. He also discovers chameleon-like ability to shift identities and re-invent himself along the way.

Pecking Order by Omar Tyree

Starting with a simple plan to promote business network events among the rich, famous, and frivolous clients he works with, Ivan Davis begins to make a name for himself. He soon comes face-to-face with Lucina Gallo, the reigning diva of San Diego's nightlife culture. She needs a new partner she can trust, and one who knows everything about money.

For this dollar-hungry entrepreneur, the timing couldn't be better. Who wouldn't want to be partners with the most glamorous girl in the city? Ivan quickly teams up with her for business -- and for possible pleasure. However, for Lucina, business is business and nothing extra. Or is it?

After throwing a sizzling-hot birthday party for a popular San Diego Charger, Ivan finds himself babysitting Lucina's so-called girlfriends, some of the most spoiled and exotic women he has ever encountered. That's when the business deals begin to fall outside the bounds of simple promotion and parties. Ivan finds himself thrust into the limelight and lands at the doorstep of easy access to women, cash, cars, private jets, and multimillion-dollar real estate. But as the ridiculous amounts of money and power start to pile up, leaving a trail of broken hearts, fractured egos, and challenged loyalties, Ivan is forced to ask himself: How much money is enough?

Dying for Revenge by Eric Jerome Dickey

Hit man Giedon is finally back for another installment of murder, mayhem, and love. In this globe-trotting sequel and exciting sequel to Sleeping with Strangers and Waking with Enemies, Gideon enters the steamy, seedy underworld of crime and squares off with his most intriguing and and mysterious adversary yet.

Midnight by Sister Soulja

Souljah's follow-up to her bestselling novel, TheColdest Winter Ever, is another gritty coming-of-age tale, picking up the story of Midnight (a character in The Coldest Winter Ever) as he tries desperately to navigate American culture, Brooklyn streets and the dicey business of growing up. The novel begins as seven-year-old Midnight and his pregnant mother, Umma, are forced to leave their privileged life in Sudan for a hardscrabble American existence.

Midnight spends his formative years in Brooklyn guiding and translating for his loyal, loving and talented mother, helping her get a factory job while encouraging her to start a clothing line. Eventually, Midnight starts working at a Chinatown fish shop, finds love, joins a dangerous hustler's basketball league and tries to disentangle his ambivalent feelings toward romance, family and personal honor.

The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley

Living in South Central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict, still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Now freed after serving twenty-seven years in prison, he is filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets. Along with his gambler friend Billy Psalms, Socrates calls together local people of all races from their different social stations—lawyers, gangsters, preachers, Buddhists, businessmen—to conduct meetings of a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss the unanswerable questions in life.

The street philosopher enjoins his friends to explore—even in the knowledge that there’s nothing that they personally can do to change the ways of the world—what might be done anyway, what it would take to change themselves. Infiltrated by undercover cops, and threatened by strain from within, tensions rise as hot-blooded gangsters and respectable deacons fight over issues of personal and social responsibility. But simply by asking questions about racial authenticity, street justice, infidelity, poverty, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference.

Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. They’ve just finished high school and need to find jobs, but in a failing post-Katrina economy, it’s not easy. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe’s not so lucky. Desperate to alleviate the family’s poverty, he starts to sell drugs.

He can hide it from his grandmother but not his twin, and the two grow increasingly estranged. Christophe’s downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins’ parents: Cille, who abandoned them, and Sandman, a creepy, predatory addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins

Loving Cee Cee Johnson by Linda Leigh Hargrove

The shame had driven her away, prompted her to change her first name, and adopt a new hometown. Nothing good can come out of Pettigrew, at least that's what Celine "Cee Cee" Johnson, a successful TV reporter and journalist, thinks. Pettigrew loomed over Cee Cee like a huge animal that would not go away, and now she must deal with the past when she returns to her hometown on assignment.

Haunted by the traumatic events of her childhood, Cee Cee's mask begins to crack as she uncovers family secrets and finds out what really happened the night her black Jesues figurine as thrown into the fire. She is challenged as she discovers the truth about her life, and especially by the playwright who wants to tell the world about her past.

Circle of Stone by Verne Jackson

A group of friends fights to overcome severe opposition in this empowering novel, which takes place in Arkansas during the Great Depression. When Ralph, a young black boy from Colored Town, is unfairly accused of murdering two white people, his death by lynching seems inescapable. But when Dave Bailey and the group known as "The Circle" rescue Ralph and his family by giving them the resources to leave town before any arrest or real harm is done, an important shift of power occurs in Colored Town.

Tired of the brutality forced upon them, the men and women of The Circle are committed to unity and overcoming injustice by any means necessary. The success in their endeavors is a moving testament to the power of educated activism and the strength of taking a unified stand.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.

Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors-Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter-who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

In the Night of the Heat by Blair Underwood

Threatened with death after acquittal for murder, football superstar T. D. Jackson asks struggling actor and former gigolo Tennyson Hardwick for protection. Tennyson has a reputation in Hollywood after solving the murder of rapper Afrodite, but politely turns Jackson down: His acting career is taking off with a new series, and he's trying to work out his personal life after a series of wrong turns.

But Tennyson's life is upturned when his seedy past catches up to him on the set of his TV series. Then T. D. Jackson is found dead in his home, the victim of an apparent suicide.

T.D.'s gorgeous cousin, Melanie, is sure the superstar was murdered, and Jackson's family offers Tennyson an irresistible fee to discover the truth. But prying into T. D. Jackson's death means answering the question that divided a nation and destroyed a film star and a football icon's life and career: Did T. D. Jackson kill his wife?

When the investigation takes an unexpected turn toward the governor's mansion and a long-forgotten football game in the segregated South of the 1960s, Tennyson uncovers secrets tearing at the heart of two dynasties and must rely on all of his assets -- his actor's heart, deadly hands, profiler's mind, and every other part of his body -- to keep from dying next.

The Sacred Place by Daniel Black

In the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Clement enters a general store in Money, Mississippi, to purchase a soda. Unaware of the consequences of flouting the rules governing black-white relations in the South, the Chicago native defies tradition by laying a dime on the counter and turns to depart. Miss Cuthbert, the store attendant, demands that he place the money in her hand, but he refuses, declaring "I ain't no slave!" and exits with a sense of entitlement unknown to black people at the time. His behavior results in his brutal murder. This event sparks a war in Money, forcing the black community to galvanize its strength in pursuit of equality.

Going Down South by Bonnie J. Glover

When fifteen-year-old Olivia Jean finds herself in the “family way,” her mother, Daisy, who has never been very maternal, springs into action. Daisy decides that Olivia Jean can’t stay in New York and whisks her away to her grandmother’s farm in Alabama to have the baby–even though Daisy and her mother, Birdie, have been estranged for years. When they arrive, Birdie lays down the law: Sure, her granddaughter can stay, but Daisy will have to stay as well. Though Daisy is furious, she has no choice.

Now, under one little roof in the 1960s Deep South, three generations of spirited, proud women are forced to live together. One by one, they begin to lose their inhibitions and share their secrets. And as long-guarded truths emerge, a baby is born–a child with the power to turn these virtual strangers into a real, honest-to-goodness family.

She Had it Coming by Mary Monroe

If there's one thing Dolores Reese knows, it's how to keep a secret. It's a skill she learned early in life, watching her best friend Valerie Proctor do whatever it took to protect her family from her violent stepfather. Back then, Dolores was in foster care-just like Floyd Watson, a local boy who intrigues Dolores from the moment they meet. Even in high school, Dolores knows with certainty that she and Floyd are soul mates. When one bad decision sends an innocent Floyd to prison for life, Dolores pays clandestine visits and-out of a mix of love and pity-promises to stick by him.

While Floyd's world stands still, Dolores's horizons open up in exciting new ways when she lands a position working for a cruise line. There, she meets Paul Dunne, an accomplished businessman who promises her the kind of future she's always wanted-the kind she once imagined having with Floyd. Dolores is sure she can continue to visit Floyd without revealing that she's now married to another man. But when Floyd is suddenly freed on new evidence, Dolores is torn and makes a fateful decision-to live a double lie, devoting herself to two different husbands in two different cities.

Satisfied with Nothin' by Ernest Hill

Jamie Ray Griffin is among the first students to integrate his local high school in 1970s rural Louisiana15 years after court-imposed desegregation. Despite harassment, Jamie internalizes his anger much better than does his best friend, Booger, whose volatile temper leads to a riot on the first day of school. Jamie's athletic abilities earn him a starring role on the football team and the apparent respect of local residents. Yet when his cousin is caught dating a white girl, Jamie witnesses a brutal assault and lynching, which he vows never to forget.

In pursuit of a pro football career, he attends a local black university; while struggling to balance academics and increasing athletic demands, he falls in love with Stacy Lefere, an accomplished, upper-class black woman. His exploitive coaches drive others to quit, but Jamie, intent on a pro career, plays hard while his grades slide. When a crippling injury ends his chances to remain in college, Jamie is overlooked in the NFL draft and fails in a subsequent tryout as a free agent when his knee again collapses. Unable to accept Stacy's love, and with academic failureabetted by counselors who urge him to take "bowling" and "sports injuries"a near certainty, he returns to a low-paying job at home

Yellow Moon by Jewell Parker Rhodes

A medicine woman with her feet in two worlds battles evil in present-day New Orleans. Marie Levant is "the right doctor for a weird death." She's an ER doctor at a charity hospital who shares a bloodline with legendary voodoo queen Marie Laveau. The reluctant voodooienne is fiercely protective of what's hers, including her toddler Marie-Claire and a pooch named Kind Dog.

But the single mother has needs, too, which she pursues unabashedly in the Big Easy's rhythmic jazz clubs. After she sees a musician possessed during a performance, she suspects something dark has invaded her city. Next she weighs in on a series of bizarre murders whose victims include a drummer, a dock worker and a prostitute with puncture marks; the three have been drained of all their blood. To unearth the truth behind the horrifying deaths, Marie agrees to help Daniel Parks, a dedicated but open-minded homicide detective who doesn't mind Levant's unusual methods if they help him catch a killer. "This world, the next," he declares. "Don't matter. Murder is still murder."

One in a Million by Kimberla Lawson Roby

Kennedi Mason thinks she's the luckiest woman on earth. She loves her job, she has a wonderful best friend, and she's been married for ten years to her soul mate. There's nothing she can think of that could make her life any better.

Then one fateful day Kennedi receives a piece of news that will turn her world upside down. She's excited about it, and she knows that her husband, Blake, will be over the moon. He has always dreamed of this one thing happening, and she can't wait until he comes home so she can tell him.

But when she sees Blake that evening, he has a special announcement of his own. It shocks Kennedi into silence and wipes the admission she was planning to make right out of her mind. In an instant, her life and her marriage have changed, but not at all in the way that she had expected.

Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter

In the summer of 1952, twenty prominent men gather at a secret meeting on Martha’s Vineyard and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. After literally stumbling on Castle's garroted corpse in a Harlem park, Eddie Wesley, a young and ambitious African-American writer, is afraid to identify himself to the police. An inverted cross bearing a cryptic inscription clutched in the victim's hand intrigues Wesley enough for him to pursue a trail that leads to a shadowy group of conspirators known as the Palace Council.

When Eddie’s younger sister mysteriously disappears, Eddie and the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into what becomes a twenty-year search for the truth. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics, all the way to the Oval Office.

Map of Ireland by Stephanie Grant

In 1974, when Ann Ahern begins her junior year of high school, South Boston is in crisis -- Catholic mothers are blockading buses to keep Black children from the public schools, and teenagers are raising havoc in the streets. Ann, an outsider in her own Irish-American community, is infatuated with her beautiful French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugénie, who hails from Paris but is of African descent. Spurred by her adoration for Eugénie, Ann embarks on a journey that leads her beyond South Boston, through the fringes of the Black Power movement, toward love, and ultimately to the truth about herself.

The Critic by Dyanne Davis

Anyone can write a book. . . At least that's what literary critic and talk show host Jared Stone thinks. After all, how hard can it be to pen a romance novel? The women who churn those books are a bunch of empty headed, bored women, and the women that read that trash are even worse. It takes no skill to either write or read the dribble. To prove his point, he's willing to walk the walk by joining a local romance writer's chapter and cranking out a silly little novel.

Toreas Rose has spent years crafting her novel, sweating through revisions and weathering rejections with the best of them. When Jared challenges her by promising he can finish a novel in a couple of weeks, she graciously steps aside. When Jared and Toreas match wits in a contest of the literary critic vs. the romance writer, no holds are barred. As challenges, insults, and sparks fly between them things start to heat up. And quicker than you can crack the cover on a new book, the confrontation gets personal- so personal that they're creating a steamy subplot all their own. But will their ending be a literary tale of woe or a classic happily-ever-after?

Greenwood by Herbert McCann

The unprecedented prosperity and creativity of the Roaring Twenties acts as a striking counterpoint to the poverty of a young Southwestern town, in this eloquent tale drawn from real sources of African American history. The hopeful residents of Greenwood, Oklahoma, are still suffering economically but plan to turn their lives around. Richard Rowland’s love for Sarah Page worries his father and offends the sensibilities of the people who hold the power of life and death over him.

L. J. McSpadden is the son of slaves who has overcome incredible odds to become a success and yet is the thorn in the side of men more powerful than he. And William Hogg is driven to build the greatest city in the Southwest. Many more men pass through town who help shape the economic and political standards of the time, but when their goals collide with the citizens of Greenwood, a conflagration ignites that terrifies some and excites others.

The End of Baseball by Peter Schilling Jr.

Using actual events, Schilling has fictionalized a fantasy scenario in baseball history-the integration of black players into the major leagues in 1944. Bill Veeck Jr., a Marine veteran from a prestigious baseball family, buys the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943, becoming the youngest man to ever own a major league club. Veeck is a genius at publicity and promotion who wants to win the World Series-but using black players. He signs the best of the Negro League to the Athletics, against all conventional feeling and the opposition of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the vicious commissioner of baseball.

The Athletics romp through the 1944 season behind the on-and-off diamond antics of real-life stars like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella, with Veeck struggling to raise money, avoid race riots and flummox Judge Landis. This exciting, fast-paced story is a fine commentary on baseball lore, race relations, and American sentiment during World War II, and it will have the reader hanging on every pitch, wondering how Veeck and his players will overcome racial discrimination to prove they can play in the major leagues.

Blood Colony by Tananarive Due

There's a new drug on the street: Glow. Said to heal almost any illness, it is distributed by an Underground Railroad of drug peddlers. But what gives Glow its power? Its main ingredient is blood -- the blood of immortals. A small but powerful colony of immortals is distributing the blood, slowly wiping out the AIDS epidemic and other diseases around the world.

Meet Fana Wolde, seventeen years old, the only immortal born with the Living Blood. She can read minds, and her injuries heal immediately. When her best friend, a mortal, is imprisoned by Fana's family, Fana helps her escape -- and together they run away from Fana's protected home in Washington State to join the Underground Railroad. But Fana has more than her parents to worry about: Glow peddlers are being murdered by a violent, hundred-year-old sect with ties to the Vatican. Now, when Fana is most vulnerable, she is being hunted to fulfill an ancient blood prophecy that could lead to countless deaths.

Trading Dreams at Midnight by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Fifteen-year-old Neena and her younger sister, Tish, are certain their mother will return, flush with the promise of a new man. But Freeda's disappearance on the cold February morning in 1984 soon stretches from days to months and from months to years. Raised by their stern grandmother Nan, the two sisters quickly learn to look after themselves, fiercely reinventing their lives in the wake of Freeda's absence.

Two decades later, at age thirty-six, Neena has moved away from Philadelphia and supports herself by blackmailing married men. When one of her stings goes terribly wrong, she decides to return to her childhood home. Unable to face her grandmother, Neena attempts to pull one last hustle on a prominent local lawyer. But when she learns that her younger sister has been hospitalized with pregnancy complications, she must decide how to come to terms with the woman who raised her. Reunited, Neena, Tish, and Nan each confronts her own memories of the past, and together reveal their dreams for the future.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. Her slave mother has urged him to take her. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady," who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

There are other voices: the native-American Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious persecution back in England; and young Sorrow, daughter of a sea captain, who’s spent too many years at sea to be quite...normal; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother.

The Soloist by Steve Lopez

When Steve Lopez saw Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he found it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard—ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans—until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless, paranoid, and deeply troubled, but glimmers of that brilliance are still there.

Over time, Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers's life. Lopez collects donated violins, a cello, even a stand-up bass and a piano; he takes Ayers to Walt Disney Concert Hall and helps him move indoors. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. In the process of trying to save Ayers, Lopez finds that his own life is changing, and his sense of what one man can accomplish in the lives of others begins to expand in new ways

Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Harper Barnes

In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Its impact was enormous. “There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition,” remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it.

Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as an historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

Redemption is in short supply in these five stories by a Nigerian priest about children caught in the crossfire of various African countries' upheavals. The opener of this debut collection, "An Ex-mas Feast," is one of the more upbeat entries-which isn't saying much, since its eight-year-old narrator describes sniffing shoe glue to ward off hunger in a Nairobi shanty town while his 12-year-old sister proudly moves from street prostitution to a brothel. In "Fattening for Gabon," a morbid variation on Hansel and Gretel, an uncle literally fattens up his nephew and niece to sell them into slavery. Although he genuinely loves them, his repentance comes too late and with not-unexpected tragic results. The least arresting story is the slight and familiar "What Language Is That?" Their families profess liberal, inclusive attitudes, but a Christian child and her Muslim best friend are prohibited from communicating when rioting breaks out in Addis Ababa, although the girls do find, perhaps briefly, "a new language."

That miniscule glimmer of hope for humanity disappears in "Luxurious Hearses," an emotionally exhausting encapsulation of the devastation caused by religion. Baptized as an infant by his Catholic father, raised in a strict Muslim community by his mother, adolescent Jubril is targeted by extremists who happen to be his former playmates. Fleeing religious riots in northern Nigeria on a luxury bus full of Christians, he keeps his right wrist in his pocket; if they see that his hand has been amputated (for stealing, under Sharia law), they will know he is Muslim. Jubril comes close to finding acceptance among his fellow passengers, which only makes their ultimate violence against him thatmuch more disturbing. The final story, "My Parents' Bedroom," goes beyond disturbing toward unbearable as the children of a Tutsi mother and Hutu father in Rwanda witness the unspeakable acts their decent parents are forced to commit.

Breach of Peace by Eric Etheridge

In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans—blacks and whites, men and women—converged on Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge state segregation laws. The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights: it was illegal for bus and train stations to discriminate, but most did and were not interested in change. Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge "breach of the peace."

The name, mug shot, and other personal details of each Freedom Rider arrested were duly recorded and saved by agents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a Stasi-like investigative agency whose purpose was to "perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi." How the Commission thought these details would actually protect the state is not clear, but what is clear, forty-six years later, is that by carefully recording names and preserving the mug shots, the Commission inadvertently created a testament to these heroes of the civil rights movement.

War of the Bloods in My Veins by Dashaun Jiwi Morris

By turns harrowing, moving, and ultimately redemptive, this is a war story -- a war that rages out of control on the streets of the United States, claiming the lives of our loved ones and neighbors. In this memoir, complete with child soldiers, unspeakable violence, and eventual salvation, we witness the journey of an East Coast member of the notorious Bloods gang coming to terms with the lost boy he was and the transformation into the man he wants to become.

Unlike the child warriors of Mozambique and Sierra Leone, gang members and the wars they wage are the United States' homegrown nightmare. Lacking protection, support, or any alternatives, Dashaun Morris is forced into battle for the first time at age eleven, in the streets of Phoenix, when a friend's older brothers put him in a car filled with 40s and weed smoke, put a gun in his hands, then make him point it at the men on the corner and squeeze the trigger. The targets are Crips, of course, and, as Morris writes, "In the darkness of the streets, my childhood is murdered.... I am reborn -- a gangster."

Mudbound by Hillary Joran

In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm -- a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not -- charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South.

It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

The Tempest Tales by Walter Mosley

Tempest Landry, a quick-witted African American resident of Harlem, NY, is walking home when a case of mistaken identity leads to his being shot by police. He finds himself standing in line at the gates of heaven waiting to talk to Saint Peter, who reviews his past transgressions and finds him wanting. Tempest is denied entry into heaven and ordered to hell. Believing his "sins" justified and heaven refusing to see the full truth, Tempest refuses to go and challenges Saint Peter to prove to him that he is a sinner. And so begins Tempest's return to Earth with a denizen of heaven, Joshua Angel, to convince Tempest of Saint Peter's edict. Of course, the devil wants Tempest's soul and is scheming to use Tempest to destroy heaven.

The Soiling of Old Glory by Louis P. Masur

The photograph strikes us with visceral force, even years after the instant it captured. A white man, rage written on his face, lunges to spear a black man who is being held by another white. The assailant’s weapon is the American flag. Boston, April 5, 1976: As the city simmered with racial tension over forced school busing, newsman Stanley Forman hurried to City Hall to photograph that day’s protest, arriving just in time to snap the image that his editor would title “The Soiling of Old Glory.” The photo made headlines across the U.S. and won Forman his second Pulitzer Prize. It shocked Boston, and America: Racial strife had not only not ended with the 1960s, it was alive and well in the cradle of liberty.

Louis P. Masur’s evocative “biography of a photograph” unpacks this arresting image in a tour de force of historical writing. He examines the power of photography and the meaning of the flag, asking why this one picture had so much impact. Most poignantly, Masur recreates the moment and its aftermath, drawing on extensive interviews with Forman and the figures in the photo to reveal not just how the incident happened, but how it changed the lives of the men in it. The Soiling of Old Glory, like the photograph it is named for, offers a dramatic window onto the turbulence of the 1970s and race relations in America.

The Echo from Dealey Plaza by Abraham Bolden

Abraham Bolden was a young African American Secret Service agent in Chicago when he was asked by John F. Kennedy himself to join the White House Secret Service detail. For Bolden, it was a dream come true—and an encouraging sign of the charismatic president’s vision for a new America. But the dream quickly turned sour when Bolden found himself regularly subjected to open hostility and blatant racism. He was taunted, mocked, and disparaged but remained strong, and he did not allow himself to become discouraged.

More of a concern was the White House team’s irresponsible approach to security. While on his tour of presidential duty, Bolden witnessed firsthand the White House agents’ long-rumored lax approach to their job. Drinking on duty, abandoning key posts—this was not a team that appeared to take their responsibility to protect the life of the president particularly seriously. Both prior to and following JFK’s assassination, Bolden sought to expose and address the inappropriate behavior and negligence of these agents, only to find himself the victim of a sinister conspiracy that resulted in his conviction and imprisonment on a trumped-up bribery charge.

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom—and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan, Aminata helps pen the Book of Negroes, a list of blacks rewarded for service to the king with safe passage to Nova Scotia. There Aminata finds a life of hardship and stinging prejudice.

When the British abolitionists come looking for "adventurers" to create a new colony in Sierra Leone, Aminata assists in moving 1,200 Nova Scotians to Africa and aiding the abolitionist cause by revealing the realities of slavery to the British public. This captivating story of one woman's remarkable experience spans six decades and three continents and brings to life a crucial chapter in world history.

Like Trees, Walking by Ravi Howard

Whenever the phone rang at the home of Paul and Roy Deacon in the early morning hours, it often meant that someone had died. The family owned the Deacon Memorial Funeral Home and had buried the loved ones of Mobile, Alabama's black families for more than one hundred years. On the morning of March 21, 1981, the call was different: The body of nineteen-year-old Michael Donald had been found hanging from a tree on Herndon Avenue. The murder shook the citizens of Mobile, especially the Deacon brothers. They had called Michael Donald a friend.

The brothers and their hometown have to face the ramifications of the first lynching in more than sixty years. Mobile had been as peaceful as its tree-lined streets were beautiful, but the murder gave the city its own sad chapter in Alabama racial history. Like Birmingham's four little girls, Selma's Bloody Sunday, and Tuskegee's experiment, Mobile had the murder of Michael Donald.

Song Yet Sung by James McBride

Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future: from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop-in her dreams.

Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America.

No Place Safe: A Family Memoir by Kim Reid

Thirteen-year-old Kim Reid will never forget the summer of 1979. In those precious free moments when she is not taking care of her little sister while her single mother works as a cop, Kim's days are filled with thoughts of boys, makeup, and starting high school in the fall. When a heartbreaking discovery along a quiet Atlanta road makes the news, Kim's mother instructs her girls to be careful. Accustomed to her mother's warnings, Kim feels she already knows how to stay alert and carry herself as if she's not scared.

But as the shadow of danger lengthens over Kim's once-sunny landscape of friends and family, she learns there is no place safe. While her mother becomes preoccupied with her increasingly high-profile job, Kim feels life unraveling. Straddling the worlds of her black neighborhood and her wealthy white school, teetering on the brink between girl and woman, Kim is torn between fitting in and finding her own voice; between becoming strong and clinging to the last traces of her childhood.

Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret B. Jones

After her two brothers were "jumped in" by the Bloods at ages twelve and thirteen, Margaret--renamed Bree in her new street life--follwed their example. At twelve she was making deliveries for local drug dealers. For her thirteenth birthday, she received her own gun. At sixteen, forced to find a way to keep the water from being shut off in her foster home, she learned to cook crack cocaine. Soon after, she fell in love for the first time, dating a seasoned gang member until he was sentenced to life in prison. We observe the lives of these characters from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood. For some, this means following a trajectory of crime, pregnancy, imprisonment-and ultimately, death. But for Margaret, her obvious intelligence, will, and tenacity-aided by sheer luck-enable her to break free, to graduate from high school, and then college.

Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon

Fifteen-year-old Shivana Montgomery believes all black women wind up the same: single and raising children alone, like her mother. When she accidentally becomes pregnant by an older man and must decide what to do, she begins a journey towards adulthood. Then she falls in love with Rasul, a teenager with problems of his own, and together they must fight to rise above their circumstances and move toward a more positive future. Conception is told through the narrative voice of Shivana's unborn child, which gives this story of a young woman's struggle through life a new and different depth.