Central Skagit Library District

Profiles fifty-two black heroes from the past and present, including author Toni Morrison, musician Stevie Wonder, astronaut Mae Jemison, athlete Usain Bolt, and United States President Barack Obama.

"Akim Aliu--also known as "Dreamer"--is a Ukrainian-Nigerian-Canadian professional hockey player whose career took him all around the world and who experienced systemic racism at every turn. Dreamer tells Akim's incredible story, from being the only Black child in his Ukrainian community, to his family struggling to make ends meet while living in Toronto, to confronting the racist violence he often experienced both on and off the ice. This is a gut-wrenching...

"In the summer of 1974, a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of Southie, the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart. One night Mary Pat's teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train...

As the newly crowned first Black king of England, seventeen-year-old James faces intense media scrutiny and a blackmailer intent on disclosing his deepest secrets, including his sexuality and hidden relationship.

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures.

"A boy's mirror gives him a whole new way of seeing himself"--

"A novel in verse about a boy escaping slavers during the nineteenth century"--

"A lush and immersive tale of adventure, artistry, romance, and freedom set in eighteenth-century London and inspired by a true story. "I had little right to live, born on a slave ship where my parents both died. But I survived, and indeed, you might say I did more." It's 1746 and Georgian London is not a safe place for a young Black man, especially one who has escaped slavery. After the twinkling lights in the Fleet Street coffee shops are blown...

When you live in a village at the edge of the no-go desert, you need to make your own fun. That's when you and your brothers get inventive and build a bike from scratch, using everyday items like an old milk pot (maybe Mum is still using it, maybe not) and a used flour sack.

"In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers' community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers' story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary...