Ocean State Libraries

For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

Racial tension runs high in 1971 Durham, North Carolina as residents continue to fight the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate their schools. A series of town meetings are called to discuss the matter. Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis, the meeting co-chairs, have very different views. Passionately advocating for school integration is a way of life for Atwater, a champion for Civil Rights. C.P. Ellis, Exalted Cyclops leading the Durham chapter of...

The author describes the threats and emotional abuse she endured from white students and adults along with her fears of endangering her family as she commited to being one of the first African American students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.

In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy twelve-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."
"An epic of American city life...a story of such hypnotic specificity...

"It's 1963, and things are changing for Jezebel Turner. Her beloved grandmother has just passed away. The local police deputy won't stop harassing her family. With school integration arriving in South Carolina, Jez and her twin brother, Jay, are about to begin the school year with a bunch of new kids. But the biggest change comes when Jez and Jay turn eleven and their uncle, Doc, tells them he's going to train them in rootwork. Jez and Jay have always...

"The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation -- in Little Rock and throughout the South -- and an...

The Carter family stuggles to integrate an all-white school in Drew, Mississippi, in 1965.

"In 1956, one year before federal troops escorted the Little Rock 9 into Central High School, fourteen year old Jo Ann Allen was one of twelve African-American students who broke the color barrier and integrated Clinton High School in Tennessee. At first things went smoothly for the Clinton 12, but then outside agitators interfered, pitting the townspeople against one another. Uneasiness turned into anger, and even the Clinton Twelve themselves wondered...