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  Lies We Tell Ourselves

  Robin Talley

  In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.

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  Love, Hate, and Other Filters

  Samira Ahmed

  Maya Aziz, seventeen, is caught between her India-born parents' world of college and marrying a suitable Muslim boy and her dream world of film school and dating her classmate, Phil, when a terrorist attack changes her life forever.

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  Lovely War

  Julie Berry

  In the perilous days of World Wars I and II, the gods hold the fates-- and the hearts-- of four mortals in their hands. They are Hazel, James, Aubrey, and Colette. A classical pianist from London, a British would-be architect-turned-soldier, a Harlem-born ragtime genius in the U.S. Army, and a Belgian orphan with a gorgeous voice and a devastating past. Their story, as told by goddess Aphrodite to her husband, Hephaestus, and her lover, Ares, is filled with hope and heartbreak, prejudice and passion, and reveals that, though War is a formidable force, it's no match for the transcendent power of Love.

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  Loving vs. Virginia: Lifting the Ban Against Interracial Marriage

  Susan Dudley Gold

  Describes the case of Loving v. Virginia including each side's claims, the outcome, and excerpts from the Supreme Court justices' decisions.

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  Loving V. Virginia: Interracial Marriage

  Karen Alonso

  Explores the Supreme Court case that challenged and eventually overturned Virginia's law forbidding interracial marriages.

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  Lu

  Jason Reynolds

  Lu knows he can lead Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and the team to victory at the championships, but it might not be as easy as it seems. Suddenly, there are hurdles in Lu's way--literally and not-so-literally--and Lu needs to figure out, fast, what winning the gold really means--

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  Lucky Beans

  Becky Birtha

  During the Great Depression, Marshall, an African American boy, uses lessons learned in arithmetic class and guidance from his mother to figure out how many beans are in a jar in order to win her a new sewing machine in a contest.

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  Lunch Box Dream

  Tony Abbott

  Told from multiple points of view, a white family on a 1959 road trip between Ohio and Florida, visiting Civil War battlefields along the way, crosses paths with a black family near Atlanta, where one of their children has gone missing.

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  Maniac Magee

  Jerry Spinelli

  After his parents die, Jeffrey Lionel Magee's life becomes legendary, as he accomplishes athletic and other feats which awe his contemporaries.

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  Map of Ireland

  Stephanie Grant

  In 1974, when Ann Ahern begins her junior year of high school, South Boston is in crisis -- Catholic mothers are blockading buses to keep Black children from the public schools, and teenagers are raising havoc in the streets. Ann, an outsider in her own Irish-American community, is infatuated with her beautiful French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugénie, who hails from Paris but is of African descent. Spurred by her adoration for Eugénie, Ann embarks on a journey that leads her beyond South Boston, through the fringes of the Black Power movement, toward love, and ultimately to the truth about herself.

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  March Book One

  John Lewis and Andrew Aydin

  This graphic novel is Congressman John Lewis' first-hand account of his lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. BookOne spans Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a climax on the steps of City Hall. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington D.C., and from receiving beatings from state troopers, to receiving the Medal of Freedom awarded to him by Barack Obama, the first African-American president.

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  Martin's Big Words

  Doreen Rappaport

  A brief biographical sketch of Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the greatest figures in the American civil rights movement.

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  Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968

  Alice Faye Duncan

  This historical fiction picture book presents the story of nine-year-old Lorraine Jackson through prose and poetry. In 1968 she witnessed the Memphis sanitation strike--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final stand for justice before his assassination--when her father, a sanitation worker, participated in the protest.

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  Midnight Without a Moon

  Linda Williams Jackson

  Rose Lee Carter, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl, dreams of life beyond the Mississippi cotton fields during the summer of 1955, but when Emmett Till is murdered and his killers are unjustly acquitted, Rose is torn between seeking her destiny outside of Mississippi or staying and being a part of an important movement.

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  Missing in Action

  Dean Hughes

  While his father is missing in action in the Pacific during World War II, twelve-year-old Jay moves with his mother to small-town Utah, where he sees prejudice from both sides, as a part-Navajo himself and through an unlikely friendship with Japanese American Ken from the nearby internment camp.

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  Mountains to Climb

  Richard M. Wainwright

  Roberto spends two years in the U.S. with his one-eyed llama and overcomes prejudice against him and two physically disabled students.

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  My Year in the Middle

  Lila Quintero Weaver

  Sixth-grader Lu Olivera just wants to keep her head down and get along with everyone in her class. The trouble is, Lu’s old friends have been changing lately — acting boy crazy and making snide remarks about Lu’s newfound talent for running track. Lu’s secret hope for a new friend is fellow runner Belinda Gresham. But in 1970 in Red Grove, Alabama, blacks and whites don’t mix. As segregationist ex-governor George Wallace ramps up his campaign against the current governor, Albert Brewer, growing tensions in the state — and in the classroom — mean that Lu can’t stay neutral about the racial divide at school. Will she find the gumption to stand up for what’s right and to choose friends who do the same?

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  New Boy

  Julian Houston

  Fifteen-year-old Rob Garrett wants nothing more than to escape the segregated South and prove himself. But in late 1950s Virginia, opportunity doesn’t come easily to an African American. So Rob’s parents take the unusual step of enrolling their son in a Connecticut boarding school, where he will have the best education available. He will also be the first student of color in the school’s history. No matter—Rob Garrett is on his way. But times are changing. While Rob is experiencing the privilege and isolation of private school, a movement is rising back home. Men and women are organizing, demanding an end to segregation, and in Rob’s hometown, his friends are on the verge of taking action. There is even talk about sitting in at a lunch counter that refuses to serve black people. How can Rob hope to make a difference when he’s a world away?

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  New Shoes

  Susan Lynn Meyer

  Set in the South during the time of segregation, this lushly illustrated picture book brings the civil rights era to life for contemporary readers as two young girls find an inventive way to foil Jim Crow laws.When her brother's hand-me-down shoes don't fit, it is time for Ella Mae to get new ones. She is ecstatic, but when she and her mother arrive at Mr. Johnson's shoe store, her happiness quickly turns to dejection. Ella Mae is unable to try on the shoes because of her skin color. Determined to fight back, Ella Mae and her friend Charlotte work tirelessly to collect and restore old shoes, wiping, washing, and polishing them to perfection. The girls then have their very own shoe sale, giving the other African American members of their community a place to buy shoes where they can be treated fairly and "try on all the shoes they want."

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  Night Music

  Jenn Marie Thorne

  Ruby and Oscar are caught up in a romance despite very different backgrounds and her having given up on music, while he is the protégé of her father, a renowned composer.

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  Night on Fire

  Ronald Kidd

  When thirteen-year-old Billie Sims learns that the Freedom Riders, a civil rights group protesting segregation on buses in the summer of 1961, will be traveling through Anniston, Alabama, she thinks change could be coming to her stubborn town. But what starts as angry grumbles soon turns to brutality, and Billie is forced to reconsider her own views.

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  Not My Idea

  Anastasia Higginbotham

  Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness is a a picture book that invites white children and parents to become curious about racism, accept that it's real, and cultivate justice.

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  Noughts & Crosses (Noughts & Crosses #1)

  Malorie Blackman

  Sephy is a Cross - a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a nought - a 'colourless' member of the underclass who were once slaves to the Crosses. The two have been friends since early childhood. But that's as far as it can go.

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  Obama: A Promise of Change

  David Mendell and Sarah L. Thomson

  A journalist who has covered the senator and presidential candidate since his campaign for the Senate offers a portrait that features his childhood and youth in Hawaii and his embrace of seemingly ruthless campaign tactics.

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  Out of Darkness

  Ashley Hope Perez

  Loosely based on a school explosion that took place in New London, Texas in 1937, this is the story of two teenagers: Naomi, who is Mexican, and Wash, who is black, and their dealings with race, segregation, love, and the forces that destroy people.