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.