Black History Month - Teens

"In the summer of 1964, as the Civil Rights movement boiled over, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent more than seven hundred college students to Mississippi to help black Americans already battling for democracy, their dignity and the right to vote. The campaign was called "Freedom Summer." But on the evening after volunteers arrived, three young civil rights workers went missing, presumed victims of the Ku Klux Klan. The disappearance...

Once Portland-famous and now infamous, seventeen-year-old Naema Bradshaw is an Eloko--a charismatic person gifted with a melody that people adore--who navigates a personal and public reckoning, confronts the limits of her privilege, and discovers the nature of her Black girl magic.

At the Freedman's Colony of Roanoke Island, a haven for the recently emancipated, the four March sisters--Meg, Joanna, Bethlehem, and Amethyst--come into their own as independent young Black women together facing love, sickness, heartbreak, and new horizons.

When the murder of his classmate at an elite boarding school seems to be forgotten overnight, seventeen-year-old Douglas must confront centuries of secrets in the school's past and a vengeful creature in the forest surrounding the campus.

Erin Powers navigates growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee being raised by a white, closeted lesbian mother. Based on the author's experience. Two girls on different timelines-- each growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee-- find their lives bridged by a mysterious portal. Part memoir, part speculative fiction, Gibney examines the absurdities of the adoptee experience through her own adoption experiences. -- adapted from jacket...

Ruth Fitz is surrounded by activism. Her mother is a senator who frequently appears on CNN as a powerful Black voice fighting for legislative social change within the Black community. Her father, a professor of African American history, is a walking encyclopedia, spouting off random dates and events. And her beloved older sister, Virginia, is a natural activist, steadily gaining notoriety within the community and on social media. Ruth, on the other...

"Interconnected stories present a picture of racial inequality in America, showing systemic discrimination in all areas of society and showing the unbroken line of Black resistance to this inequality"--

Biracial twin sisters--one who presents as black and the other as white--are determined to put the ghosts of the past to rest and to uncover the truth behind their parents' murders in the Jim Crow South. As infants, twin sisters Charlie Yates and Magnolia Heathwood were separated after the lynching of their parents, who died for loving across the color line. Now Charlie is a young Black organizer in Harlem, while white-passing Magnolia is the heiress...

When seventeen-year-old Avery moves to rural Georgia to live with her ailing grandmother, she encounters decade-old family secrets and a mystery surrounding the town's racist past.

"In her most famous spoken-word poem, author of the Pura Belpré-winning novel-in-verse The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo embraces all the complexities of Black hair and Afro-Latinidad--the history, pain, pride, and powerful love of that inheritance. Paired with full-color illustrations by artist Andrea Pippins in a format that will appeal to fans of Mahogany L. Browne's Black Girl Magic or Jason Reynolds's For Everyone, this poem can now be read in a...