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Visit the Civil Rights Room
The Civil Rights Room is a space for education and exploration of NPL's Civil Rights Collection. The materials exhibited here capture the drama of a time when thousands of African-American citizens in Nashville sparked a nonviolent challenge to racial segregation in the city and across the South.
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High School Project Lit Titles
Nashville Reads 2024 | The Works of Jason Reynolds
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Nashville Reads 2024 | The Works of Jason Reynolds
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Description
When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend. Told through Rashad and Quinn's alternating viewpoints.
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"A woman and her husband admitted to a hospital to have a baby requests that their nurse be reassigned -- they are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is Black, to touch their baby. The hospital complies, but the baby later goes into cardiac distress when Ruth is on duty. She hesitates before rushing in to perform CPR. When her indecision ends in tragedy, Ruth finds herself on trial, represented by a white public defender who warns against...
3) Ghost boys
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Twelve-year-old Jerome is shot by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real threat. As a ghost, he observes the devastation that's been unleashed on his family and community in the wake of what they see as an unjust and brutal killing.
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Middle school student Junie Kim turns inward and becomes depressed after enduring the taunts of a school bus bully and a racist incident happens at school. While working on a school assignment to interview a family elder, Junie learns of her Korean grandparents' sufferings and courage during the Korean War and learns to unpack her own courage to face the racism surrounding her.
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After a white mob murders her father, twelve-year-old Ophelia Harrison is awakened by his ghost, who tells her to wake her mother and retreat to the woods. They comply, and escape before their home is burned to the ground by the same men. The pair move to Pittsburgh to live with relatives and take jobs at Daffodil Manor, the home of a wealthy white woman. There, Ophelia continues to see ghosts and learns she has a gift with helping them move on.
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"Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada in this electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing. Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she's thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They've only...
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Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
High School Project Lit Titles
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
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High School Project Lit Titles
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
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Description
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...
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"The Record Keeper is empathy through fiction."
- Actor, Comedian and Film Producer Wayne Brady on The Record Keeper which he plans to bring to the Silver Screen.
The Record Keeper is a visceral and thrilling near-future dystopia examining past and present race relations.
After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law—in...
- Actor, Comedian and Film Producer Wayne Brady on The Record Keeper which he plans to bring to the Silver Screen.
The Record Keeper is a visceral and thrilling near-future dystopia examining past and present race relations.
After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law—in...
10) Fast pitch
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5th Grade Reading
Middle School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
Summer Olympics: Sports Fiction for Kids
Middle School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
Summer Olympics: Sports Fiction for Kids
Description
"Shenice Lockwood dreams of leading the Fulton Firebirds to the U12 softball regional championship. But Shenice's focus gets shaken when her great-uncle Jack reveals that a career-ending-and family-name-ruining-crime may have been a setup. It's up to Shenice to discover the truth about her family's past--and fast--before secrets take the Firebirds out of the game forever."--
11) Sorrowland
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Vern escapes the religious compound where she was raised and gives birth to twins in the forest, raising them away from the influence of the outside world. Her community won't let her go that easily, however, and as they pursue, she breaks the boundaries of humanity, changing her body in uncanny ways in order to protect her family.
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In the year following their son's death, May Chen's parents face racist accusations of putting too much pressure on their son and causing his death by suicide, and May attempts to challenge the racism and ugly stereotypes through her writing, only to realize that she still has a lot to learn and that her actions have consequences for her family as well as herself.
13) What lane?
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Description
Biracial sixth-grader Stephen feels like he's living in two worlds, each with different rules. He's starting to notice that strangers treat him differently than his white friends and as he learns about the Black Lives Matter movement, he discovers how to navigate race and friendships.
14) Memphis: a novel
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"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...
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"Nate Evers, a young black political activist, struggles with rage as his people are still being killed in the streets...When his little cousin is murdered, Nate shuns the graffiti murals, candlelight vigils, and Twitter hashtags that are commonplace after these senseless deaths. Instead, he leads 3 grief-stricken friends on a mission of retribution, kidnapping the descendants of long-ago perpetrators of hate crimes, confronting the targets with their...
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"Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains,...
17) Goodnight racism
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Illustrations and text show children the language to dream of a better world.
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"Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity...
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In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...
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"Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncerain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions -- affection, despair, and hope."--Page 4 of cover
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