Frank Carlson Library

Documents the history and origin of the Ku Klux Klan from its beginning in Pulaski, Tennessee, and provides personal accounts, congressional documents, diaries, and more.

In 1945, thirteen-year-old Levi Battle travels to find the father he has not seen in three years, going from Chicago to segregated North Carolina and finally to Pendleton, Oregon, where he learns that his father's unit, the all-black 555th paratrooper battalion, will never see combat but finally has a mission. Includes historical notes.

Now adapted for young adults, the #1 New York times best-selling memoir offers an intimate look at Barack Obama's early days, tracing the future 44th president's odyssey through family, race, and identity. The son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. Obama retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of...

"Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need...

"A picture book in verse that threads together past and present to explore the legacy of slavery during a classroom lesson"-- From the fireside tales in an African village, through the unspeakable passage across the Atlantic, to the backbreaking work in the fields of the South, this is a story of a people's struggle and strength, horror and hope. This is the story of American slavery, a story that needs to be told and understood by all of us. A testament...

"In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith..."-- Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry--that the black folk assembled didn't understand politics, that they weren't as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King,...

"The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults! Based on the adult bestseller by Ibram X. Kendi, and co-authored by bestselling author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist will serve as a guide for teens seeking a way forward in acknowledging, identifying, and dismantling racism and injustice"-- We can let racism stand, or we can stand against it. Readers will follow a young Kendi as he learns...

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina's monstrous winds and surging water overwhelmed the protective levees around low-lying New Orleans, Louisiana. Eighty percent of the city flooded, in some places under twenty feet of water. Property damages across the Gulf Coast topped $100 billion. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people lost their lives. The tale of this historic storm and the drowning of an American city is one of selflessness, heroism,...

From the award-winning author of All Her Little Secrets comes yet another gripping, suspenseful novel, in which, after the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two black sisters run away to different parts of the country...but can they escape the secrets they left behind? It's the summer of 1964, and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one-year-old...

"The tragedies and reckonings around racism that have rocked the country have created a specific crisis for parents and other caregivers: how do we talk to our children about it? How do we guide our children to avoid repeating our racist history? While we work to dismantle racist behaviors in ourselves and the world around us, how do we raise our children to be antiracists? After he wrote the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning,...