Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions,...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
Countless books on success tell you what you need to get that you don't already possess. In Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success, Steve Harvey tells you how to achieve your dreams using the gift you already have. Every one of us was born with a gift endowed by our creator{u2014}something you do the best at with very little effort. While it can be like someone else's, your gift is yours alone. No one can take it away. You are the only one who can...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 8
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this second volume of her poignant autobiographical series, Maya Angelou powerfully captures the struggles and triumphs of her passionate life with dignity, wisdom, humor, and humanity.
“A curiously heartening story in which decency, honor, truth, love do exist, imperfectly, fractionally and flickeringly, not in some Platonic realm of the ideal, but in the flawed lives of real men and women.”—The...
“A curiously heartening story in which decency, honor, truth, love do exist, imperfectly, fractionally and flickeringly, not in some Platonic realm of the ideal, but in the flawed lives of real men and women.”—The...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature.
“[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware.”—The New York Times
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism,...
“[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware.”—The New York Times
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism,...
5) Becoming
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 29
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon look her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.7 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
"I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the answers to all life's questions. Quite the contrary, I began this book as an exploration, an exercise in selfquestioning. In other words, I wanted to find out, as I looked back at a long and complicated life, with many twists and turns, how well I've done at measuring up to the values I myself have set."
In this luminous memoir, a true American
...10) I take my coffee black: reflections on Tupac, musical theater, faith, and being black in America
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"As a six-foot-two, dreadlocked black man, Tyler Merritt knows that getting too close to the wrong person can get him killed. But he also believes that proximity can be a cure for racism. Tyler Merritt's video "Before You Call the Cops" has been viewed more than 59 million times. He's appeared on Jimmy Kimmel and Sports Illustrated and has been profiled in the New York Times. The viral video's main point--that the more you know someone, the more empathy,...
Author
Publisher
Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Formats
Description
Aretha Franklin began life as the golden daughter of a progressive and promiscuous Baptist preacher. Raised without her mother, she was a gospel prodigy who gave birth to two sons in her teens and left them and her native Detroit for New York, where she struggled to find her true voice. It was not until 1967, when a white Jewish producer insisted she return to her gospel-soul roots, that fame and fortune finally came via "Respect" and a rapidfire...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty brings a fresh perspective to our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry--both black and white--through food, from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touchpoints in our ongoing struggles...
Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In her ... bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With [this book] she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"Growing up during the Depression in the segregated coal-mining town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, the bright and willful Doris Payne dreamed big. Fascinated by the fine clothes, jewels, and lifestyles in magazines such as Town & Country and Harper's Bazaar, she imagined a world beyond herself, one in which she did not carry the weight of limitations that others imposed on her and where her beloved mother was free from her father's abuse. After the...
15) March: Book one
Author
Series
March volume 1
Publisher
Top Shelf Productions
Pub. Date
2013
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
To share his remarkable story, Congressman John Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy. March is a vivid, first-hand account of Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights (including his key roles in the historic 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March). Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama,...
Author
Pub. Date
2015
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.5 - AR Pts: 32
Language
English
Formats
Description
ONE OF TIME’S TEN MOST IMPORTANT NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that...
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Reading Challenge: 2023 AViD Author
2024 Reading Challenge February Bonus Category: Nonfiction by a Black Author
2024 Reading Challenge February Bonus Category: Nonfiction by a Black Author
Description
"One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris's round-cheeked, lively twenty-two-month-old, wakes up listless and unresponsive. At the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor's life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs's increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. This is a stirring and radiantly written examination of...
18) On Juneteenth
Author
Language
English
Description
"It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...
Author
Language
English
Description
In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays...
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
Interlibrary Loan Request
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Des Moines Public Library can be requested from other libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? If the item was published recently, submit a purchase suggestion. Submit Request