Lesa Cline-Ransome

After his mother's death in 1946, eleven-year-old Langston and his father leave behind their quiet life in Alabama and move to Chicago. Struggling to fit in and missing his mother, Langston finds refuge at the local library where, unlike his library in Alabama, blacks are just as welcome as whites to use. There he discovers the poetry of Langston Hughes and a secret--he was named after this very poet whose work his mother loved.

Illustrated children's book about a young African American girl and her family who leave their sharecropping farm in the South to move to New York City as part of the Great Migration northward in search of better opportunity.

"In the 1870s, a Black family undertakes a perilous wagon journey westward for a tenuous shot at freedom in Nebraska."-- Provided by publisher.

The young man known as Teach secretly learned to read, write, and use numbers growing up alongside the master's son. And although on this Southern plantation these are skills he can never flaunt, Teach doesn't keep them to himself: In the course of a week, he'll teach little ones the alphabet in the corner stall of a stable and hold a moonlit session where men scratch letters in the dirt. He'll decipher a discarded letter bearing news of Yankee soldiers...

Examines the life of the legendary baseball player, who was the first African-American to pitch in a Major League World Series.

"An interracial friendship between two teenaged girls goes tragically wrong in this powerful historical novel set in the Jim Crow South. For Lamb follows a family striving to better their lives in the late 1930s Jackson, Mississippi. Lamb's mother is a hard-working, creative seamstress who cannot reveal she is a lesbian. Lamb's brother has a brilliant mind and has even earned a college scholarship for a black college up north- if only he could curb...

"The story of Henry David Thoreau's time at Walden Pond is contrasted with businessman Frederic Tudor's scheme to cut 180 tons of ice from Walden Pond and transport it to India."-- Provided by publisher.

Celebrates the 1936 debut of the Benny Goodman quartet with Teddy Wilson in Chicago, considered to be the first widely seen integrated jazz performance.

This is the inspirational story of two tennis legends who were fierce competitors on the courts, but close sisters above all.

"Words Set Me Free is the inspiring story of young Frederick Douglass's path to freedom through reading"