Ocean State Libraries

Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds--and...

From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a...

At Ballou Senior High, a crime-infested school in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings will not swallow his pride, and with unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it--and it does. The summer after his junior year, at a program...

This novel of Pittsburgh, by the author of Last Night at the Lobster, “celebrates the lives of everyday people in an extraordinary way” (San Francisco Chronicle).
 
Pittsburgh, 1998: Chris “Crest” Tolbert is eighteen years old, a soon-to-be father, and partially paralyzed after an accident that left his best friend dead. As he navigates the challenges of new fatherhood and life as a paraplegic,...

The film that helped reopen one of history's most notorious cold case civil rights murders is the result of the director's 10-year journey to uncover the truth. In August, 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley of Chicago sent her only child, Emmett Louis Till, to visit relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that only 8 days later, Emmett would be abducted from his Great-Uncle's home, brutally beaten and murdered for one of the oldest Southern taboos...

A Coretta Scott King and Printz honor book now in paperback. A Wreath for Emmett Till is "A moving elegy," says The Bulletin.

In 1955 people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral held by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime

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As much as Alex Rufus tries, he often comes up short. It is hard to for him to be present when every time he touches an object or person, Alex sees into its future. When he touches his car, he sees it years from now, totaled and underwater. When he touches Talia, he sees them at the precipice of breaking up, and that terrifies him. These visions are a curse, distracting him, making him anxious and unable to live an ordinary life. And then Alex touches...

The shameful, sadistic murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black boy who whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955, was a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement. Although Till's killers were apprehended, they were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury and proceeded to sell their story to a journalist, providing grisly details of the murder. Three months after Till's body was recovered, the Montgomery Bus...

Jackie Ishida, a young Japanese American woman living in Los Angeles, learns of the deaths of four young men in her grandfather's store during the 1965 Watts riot, and sets out to discover the truth about their deaths, along the way uncovering some long-buried family secrets as well.

Listen to an intimate account of a mother's efforts to save her son. Telling her son's story against the backdrop of a society plagued by systemic racism, economic inequality, and mass incarceration, Golden offers a form of witness and testimony in a time of crisis for Black Americans. Learn how to grapple with the realities of Black America. Join Golden as she confronts the root causes of violence inflicted upon Black teen boys and reassesses the...