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Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Civil Rights Movement Booklist January 2025 |
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Mama's Library Summers
by Melvina Noel and Daria Peoples
Mama takes her two daughters to the library every summer to pick out books about Black people so they can see the struggles, strength, and hope of people who look like them.
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Hair Like Obama's, Hands Like Lebron's
by Carole Boston Weatherford and Savanna Durr
From Colin Kaepernick to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Benjamin Crump, Hair Like Obama's, Hands Like Lebron's is a picture book celebration of Black history and excellence.
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Onyx & Beyond
by Amber McBride
Set against the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, twelve-year-old Onyx dreams of becoming an astronaut as he navigates his mother's early-onset dementia and avoids foster care.
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We Dream a World: Carrying the Light from My Grandparents Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King
by Yolanda Renee King
In this stirring tribute to Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, Jr., their granddaughter, Yolanda, a national civil rights figure in her own right, is ready to lead in this powerful picture book. With inspiration from Langston Hughes and deep love for her grandparents, Yolanda King shows the world that young people are strong enough to carry on their elders' legacy while creating a new path for themselves. Her words are meaningful and universal, painting an expressive tableau of the issues facing young people today - racial equality, bullying, gun violence, climate change, disease, community, empowerment, inclusion, and more. Yolanda's words will comfort and inspire the next generation of dreamers.
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I See Color: An Affirmation and Celebration of Our Diverse World
by Valerie Bolling
Highlighting people such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Madonna Thunder Hawk, and Basemah Atweh, incredible leaders are honored, seen, and heard on every page. Part ode to an array of beautiful skin tones and part introduction to change-makers in history, this book is a perfect conversation starter for readers everywhere.
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The Color of a Lie
by Kim Johnson
Calvin knows how to pass for white. He's done it plenty of times before. For his friends in Chicago, when they wanted food but weren't allowed in a restaurant. For work, when he and his dad would travel for the Green Book. This is different. After a tragedy in Chicago forces the family to flee, they resettle in an idyllic all-white suburban town in search of a better life. Calvin's father wants everyone to embrace their new white lifestyles, but it's easier said than done. Hiding your true self is exhausting -- which leads Calvin across town where he can make friends who know all of him...and spend more time with his new crush, Lily. But when Calvin starts unraveling dark secrets about the white town and its inhabitants, passing starts to feel even more suffocating -- and dangerous - -than he could have imagined.
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I Rise
by Marie Arnold
14-year-old Ayo has to decide whether to take on her mother's activist role when her mom is shot by police. As she tries to find answers, Ayo looks to the wisdom of her ancestors and her Harlem community for guidance.
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All You Have to Do
by Autumn Allen
In April 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Kevin joins a protest that shuts down his Ivy League campus. In September 1995, amidst controversy over the Million Man March, Gibran challenges the “See No Color” hypocrisy of his prestigious New England prep school. As the two students, whose lives overlap in powerful ways, risk losing the opportunities their parents worked hard to provide, they move closer to discovering who they want to be instead of accepting as fact who society and family tell them they are.
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Take the Long Way Home
by Rochelle Alers
Spanning seven decades and two continents, this chronicle of one woman's remarkable journey through some of history's most turbulent eras follows Claudia Patterson, freedom fighter, businessperson, wife, master of languages and ultimately, savior of a European dynasty.
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Homeward: A Novel
by Angela Jackson-Brown
Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life. Her sister introduces her to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—young people who are taking risks and fighting battles Rose has only seen on television. Feeling emotions for the first time in what feels like forever, the excited and frightened Rose finds herself becoming increasingly involved in the resistance efforts.
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The First Ladies
by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Initially drawn together because of their shared belief in women's rights and the power of education, civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt fight together for justice and equality, holding each other's hands through tragedy and triumph.
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I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World
by Martin Luther King
This fortieth-anniversary edition honors Martin Luther King Jr.'s courageous dream and his immeasurable contribution by presenting his most memorable words in a concise and convenient edition. As Coretta Scott King says in her foreword, "This collection includes many of what I consider to be my husband's most important writings and orations." In addition to the famed keynote address of the 1963 march on Washington, the renowned civil rights leader's most influential words included here are the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," the essay "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," and his last sermon, "I See the Promised Land," preached the day before he was assassinated.
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Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the International Hunt for His Assassin
by Hampton Sides
On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man--whose real name was James Earl Ray--drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace's racist presidential campaign. On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck, provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering crusade, King joined the sanitation workers' cause, but their march down Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to Memphis in April.
With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey. Magnificent in scope, drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, this nonfiction thriller illuminates one of the darkest hours in American life--an example of how history is so often a matter of the petty bringing down the great.
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King : A Life
by Jonathan Eig
Drawing on recently declassified FBI files, this first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon reveals the courageous and often emotionally troubled man who demanded peaceful protest but was rarely at peace with himself, while showing how his demands for racial and economic justice remain just as urgent today.
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The King Years: Historic Moments in The Civil Rights Movement
by Taylor Branch
The King Years delivers riveting tales of everyday heroes who achieved miracles in constructive purpose and yet poignantly fell short. Here is the full sweep of an era that still reverberates in national politics. Its legacy remains unsettled; there are further lessons to be discovered before free citizens can once again move officials to address the most intractable, fearful dilemmas. This vital primer amply fulfills its author's dedication: "For students of freedom and teachers of history."
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