Stories from our past, present, and future about the perils of misinformation, stereotyping, and racism. With nonfiction titles that will help you build a better future.
New York City high school student Mateo dreams of becoming a Broadway star, but his life is transformed after his parents are deported to Mexico.
In Suffrage Song, Cass takes a critical, intersectional approach to the movement's history -- celebrating the pivotal, hard-fought battles for voting rights while also laying bare the racist compromises suffrage leaders made along the way. She explores the multigenerational arc of the movement, humanizing key historical figures from the early days of the suffrage fight (Susan B. Anthony, Frances Watkins Harper), to the dawn of the "New Women" (Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell), to the Civil Rights era (Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker).
In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history.
Here is the explosive story of the Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania, a judicial justice miscarriage that sent more than 2,500 children and teens to a for-profit detention center while two judges lined their pockets with cash.
Neither Malena nor Ruby expected to be leaders of their high school's dress code rebellion. Meanwhile, the girls have to face their own insecurities and biases, as well as the ups and downs of their newfound friendship.
This is the story of how the movement that started with a hashtag--#BlackLivesMatter--spread across the nation and then across the world and the journey that led one of its co-founders, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, to this moment. Patrisse Khan-Cullors grew up in an over-policed United States where incarceration of Black people runs rampant. Surrounded by police brutality, she gathered the tools and lessons that would lead her on to found one of the most powerful movements in the world.
Liliana Cruz does what it takes to fit in at her new nearly all-white school, but when family secrets come out and racism at school gets worse than ever, she must decide what she believes in and take a stand.
For Black women, the fight for the right to vote was only one battle. An eye-opening book that tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement, when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle.
After he's called up and subbed for a varsity player who's fouled out of a crucial game, Bijan leads the scoring in an upset victory and suddenly becomes popular. When a cyberbully sends the entire high school a picture of basketball hero Bijan Majidi, photo-shopped to look like a terrorist, the school administration promises to find and punish the culprit, but Bijan just wants to pretend the incident never happened and move on.
High school junior Del Rainey unwittingly joins a Purity Pledge class at church, hoping to get closer to his long-term crush, Kiera.
While writing letters to Innocence X, a justice-seeking project, asking them to help her father, an innocent black man on death row, teenaged Tracy takes on another case when her brother is accused of killing his white girlfriend.
Big lies are told by governments, politicians, and corporations to avoid responsibility, cast blame on the innocent, win elections, disguise intent, create chaos, and gain power and wealth. Big lies are as old as civilization; they corrupt public understanding and discourse, turn science upside down, and reinvent history. The future stewards of our world require a how-to manual for seeing through big lies and thinking critically, because big lies require believers, and democracy depends on independent thought.
In an alternate 1991, the authoritarian US government keeps tabs on everybody and everything. It censors which books can be read, what music can be listened to, and which plays can be performed. When her best friend is killed by the authorities and her theater teacher disappears without a trace, Gigi decides to organize her fellow Champaign High School thespians to put on a production of Henry VI. But at what cost?
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.
Shirin, an American Muslim teenager living in the wake of 9/11 has attended 3 different high schools. Jaded and cynical in the face of humanity’s repeated cruelty at the sight of her hijab, Shirin only plans to get through high school as quickly as she can and let no one past her guarded exterior. It works until she meets Ocean James, who sees more than just her headscarf and is charmingly persistent about learning who she is, from her love of music to her burgeoning skills on the break dancing team her brother starts.
The 1963 Children's March in Birmingham, Alabama. Tiananmen Square, 1989. The 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. March for Our Lives, and School Strike for Climate. All these social justice movements were led by passionate, informed, engaged young people. Youth to Power presents the essential guide to changemaking, with advice on writing and pitching op-eds, organizing successful events and peaceful protests, time management as a student activist, utilizing social media and traditional media to spread a message, and sustaining long-term action.
An anthology of young adult stories and poems conveys acts of resistance by people marginalized by racism, discrimination and hatred, offering contributions by diverse literary masters ranging from Jason Reynolds and Samira Ahmed to Laura Silverman and Sofia Quintero
At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell his story, but no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny. But Khosrou's stories, from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, to the sad cement refugee camps of Italy are all true.
It's 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing. Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He's terrified that someone will guess that he's gay. Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Art is Judy's best friend, their school's only out and proud teen. When these three meet, all of their expectations for the future change.
Collects essays, poetry, and images that expose the racial tensions in twenty-first century life, highlighting the slights, slips of the tongue, and intentional offensives that pervade the home, school, and popular media.
Going beyond the story of America as a country "discovered" by a few brave men in the "New World," Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.
January 6, 2021, was a crisis point for American democracy, where the results of a democratic election were challenged violently. However, the crisis did not end that day. This is an unusual and frightening moment in American history. Many of the democratic norms of American society-like trust in the legitimacy of elections, and the willingness of legislators from different parties to work together-have shifted. American democracy is at a turning point, and the future is uncertain.
Incarcerated teen Quan Banks writes letters to Justyce McCallister, with whom he bonded years before over family issues, about his experiences in the American juvenile justice system.
The iconic actor and activist presents a graphic memoir detailing his experiences as a child prisoner in the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, reflecting on the hard choices his family made in the face of legalized racism.
Sent to Paris after being arrested for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda, Gerda Taro teams up with a fellow photographer to take pictures of military conflict and sell them at a high price but soon loses sight of her own safety.
Two Muslim teens in Texas are forced to navigate bodily autonomy following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in this near-future novel. Seventeen-year-old Indian American Laylah Khan, an aspiring OB-GYN, and her Palestinian American best friend Noor Awad, who dreams of being a journalist, are secretly working together to create the Texas Teen’s Guide to Safe Abortion, an “extreeeeemely illegal” document they know is “going to SAVE LIVES.” Despite their hard work, when Laylah learns that she’s pregnant, she finds it almost impossible to get an abortion.