Book Finder

Despite fierce prejudice and abuse, even being beaten to within an inch of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer was a champion of civil rights from the 1950s until her death in 1977. Integral to the Freedom Summer of 1964, Ms. Hamer gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention that, despite President Johnson’s interference, aired on national TV news and spurred the nation to support the Freedom Democrats. Featuring vibrant mixed-media art full of intricate detail, Voice of Freedom celebrates Fannie Lou Hamer’s life and legacy with a message of hope, determination, and strength. 2016 Caldecott Honor Book.

In 1954, one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth Century aimed to end school segregation in the United States. The ruling was the culmination of work by many people who stood up to racial inequality, some risking significant danger and hardship, and of careful strategizing by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Award-winning author Susan Goldman Rubin tells the stories behind the ruling and the people responsible for it. Illustrated with historical photographs, this well-researched narrative account is a perfect introduction to the history of school segregation in the United States and the long struggle to end it. An epilogue looks at the far-reaching effects of this landmark decision, and shows how our country still grapples today with a public school system not yet fully desegregated. Detailed backmatter includes a timeline, primary source texts, and summaries of all mentioned court cases. An ALA Notable Children’s Book.

As twelve-year-old Marlee starts middle school in 1958 Little Rock, it feels like her whole world is falling apart. Until she meets Liz, the new girl at school. Liz is everything Marlee wishes she could be: she’s brave, brash and always knows the right thing to say. But when Liz leaves school without even a good-bye, the rumor is that Liz was caught passing for white. Marlee decides that doesn’t matter. She just wants her friend back. And to stay friends, Marlee and Liz are even willing to take on segregation and the dangers their friendship could bring to both their families. Winner of the New-York Historical Society Children’s History Book Prize .

In 1860 Louisiana, as eighty-year-old Madame Sylvie, mistress of a failing plantation, sits for a portrait, horrific stories are revealed: that of Thisbe, an enslaved woman who must stand silent by her mistress but observes everything, and of Byron, heir to the plantation, whose desires cannot fit with his family duty.

Discover the inside story of the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of one of its most iconic figures, the late Congressman John Lewis. March is the award-winning, #1 bestselling graphic novel trilogy recounting his life in the movement, co-written with Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell. This commemorative set contains all three volumes of March in one edition.

Lyndon B. Johnson was one of the most complex and compelling presidents in US history. Anne Quirk’s biography alternates between chapters that follow LBJ’s childhood in rural Texas learning politics from his parents, his time teaching Mexican American students at a small-town school, and his days in Congress as majority leader and as vice president; and chapters that cover his work alongside civil rights leaders and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. An epilogue discusses the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that struck down key portions of the act. With engaging storytelling, Quirk paints a rich portrait of Johnson’s presidency, celebrating the accomplishments of his Great Society programs while refusing to shy away from his catastrophic decisions regarding Vietnam and the summer riots of 1967.

As the youngest marcher in the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Albama, Lynda Blackmon Lowery proved that young adults can be heroes. Jailed eleven times before her fifteenth birthday, Lowery fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. for the rights of African-Americans. In this illustrated memoir, she shows today’s young readers what it means to fight nonviolently (even when the police are using violence, as in the Bloody Sunday protest) and how it felt to be part of changing American history.

A former Democratic senator from California, in 2021 Kamala Harris became the first woman Vice President, as well as the first Black Vice President and the first Vice President of South Asian descent. Harris is known for her intelligence, toughness, and sense of humor — among students, teachers, coworkers and political opponents. Her message to kids is very much like the one her mother passed on to her: Don’t let your critics hold you back from achieving your potential.

Lipan Apache asexual teenager Ellie, who has the ability to raise the ghosts of animals, hopes to one day work as a paranormal investigator. But when her cousin Trevor is killed and his ghost appears to her, Ellie steps up to seek justice and protect his family.

To avoid spending time with his father and his new girlfriend, eleven-year-old Nathan goes to stay with his grandma, Nali, on the Navajo reservation where Nathan meets a Holy Being from the Navajo Creation Story—a Water Monster in need of his help.

An intertribal powwow connects the short stories of 16 Indigenous authors that explore Native culture, ethnic identity, and ancestry.

When 12-year-old Edie wants to connect to her Native American heritage, she learns that her parents have kept much of her family history secret.

Eighth-grader Malian is befriended and protected by a rez dog she calls Malsum when her short visit with her grandparents on the Penacook reservation is indefinitely extended by the pandemic.

After her sophomore year in high school, Apple Starkington, who grew up feeling like she didn’t fit in with her White father and stepmother, spends the summer at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation getting to know her Native family members for the first time.

Biracial eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in either in her hometown or on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. But when Daunis’s best friend, Lily, is murdered, she agrees to go undercover in her community and help the FBI while secretly pursuing her own investigation.

America in 1982: Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting U.S. autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiment simmers, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz. Paula Yoo has crafted a searing, extensively researched examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed. When Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years’ probation, the lenient sentence sparked outrage. The protests that followed led to a federal civil rights trial — the first involving a crime against an Asian American — and galvanized what came to be known as the Asian American movement.

In Dakota Territory in the 1880s, half-Chinese Hanna and her White father face racism and resistance to change as they try to make a home for themselves.

Four lives are intertwined and changed when a bully’s prank lands shy Virgil at the bottom of a well and Valencia, Kaori, and Gen band together in an epic quest to find and rescue him. 

Twelve-year-old Hanako and her family, reeling from their confinement in an internment camp, renounce their American citizenship to move to Hiroshima, a city devastated by the atomic bomb dropped by Americans at the end of World War II.

Vietnamese American teen Tien and his mother like to read fairy tales together to learn English, yet Tien struggles to find the right words to come out to his parents as gay.

Twelve-year-old Sora and her eight-year-old brother, Youngsoo, must try to escape North Korea’s oppressive Communist regime and survive three hundred miles of warzone in winter in 1950.

Twelve-year-old Korean American Junie Kim, who’s kept quiet about the bullying and racism she encounters at school, is diagnosed with depression but is later inspired to speak out after learning about her grandparents’ experiences during the Korean War.

Claire Wang, a wealthy 11th grader in Shanghai, is suddenly sent on her own or “parachuted” to California to finish private high school and finds herself boarding with Dani, a scholarship student at her new school.

Teens Haruko, a Japanese American, and Margot, a German American, form a life-changing friendship as everything around them starts falling apart in the Crystal City family internment camp during World War II.