Contemporary Prejudice

Parkland Middle School is a place the students call Darkland, because no one in it does much to stop the daily harassment of kids by other kids. Three bullied seventh graders use their smarts to get the better of their tormentors by starting an unofficial e-mail forum at school in which they publicize their experiences. Unexpectedly, lots of other kids come forward to confess their similar troubles, and it becomes clear that the problem at their school is bigger than anyone knew. 

Piri, now 17, resides with a Swedish family while she searches for news of family and friends who also might have survived the Nazi concentration camps. Although the Swedes accept her as their own daughter, she strives to hold on to her own identity and dreams of finding her blood relatives. The novel is dedicated to the many people who assisted the Jews in their efforts to find their families after the war.

In 1972, President Ida Amin had a dream that he believed was a message from God. Based on that dream, this dictator decides to eliminate all foreign Indians — the “Jews of Uganda” — in 90 days. Fifteen-year-old Sabine thinks that she and her family will be spared since they are citizens of Uganda, but eventually no one is spared from the effects of this mandate. When there is a governmental shift in power by an extremist, no one is spard.

This true account of 1960s desegregation tells the inspiring story of the Carters, black Mississippi sharecroppers who sent their children to integrate an all-white school system.

Imagine being asked to be one of the first black students to integrate an all-white school in the Fifties. Such is the case for Sylvia Patterson when she must decide whether or not to be an agent of social change or to stay in the comfort of her inferior all-black school. Readers may want to refer to Melba Pattillo Beals’s memoir Warriors Don’t Cry, for her personal account of what happened when she was one of the nine teenagers who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.

Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution is beautifully rendered in this graphic novel series.