race relations

Twelve-year-old Lena is aware of racism, but she lives a comfortable life in the segregated but relatively wealthy Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma; but on May 31, 1921, racial tensions explode, and men from downtown Tulsa invade Greenwood, set on killing and destroying the district--and as the violence escalates Lena, her parents, and her older sister search desperately for a safe place to hide from the mob.

"A high school junior teams up with a hacker during a police brutality protest to shut down a device that creates an impenetrable Dome around Baltimore that is keeping the residents in and information from going out"--Provided by publisher.

As a boy, Andrew Young learned a vital lesson from his parents when a local chapter of the Nazi party instigated racial unrest in their hometown of New Orleans in the 1930s. Andrew's father told him that when dealing with the sickness of racism, "Don't get mad, get smart." To drive home the lesson, the family went to the local theater to see newsreels of Olympic track star Jesse Owens and how he competed in Nazi Germany with dignity.

"Why? is a question asked by children daily . . . begins a straightforward and challenging conversation between children of color and the adults in their lives . . . peers through the eyes of a child as they struggle to understand why these events are happening . . . distills the conversations many children and adults are having about race, injustice, and anger in communities throughout our country, and gives them context that young readers can connect with"--Provided by publisher.

Told from two viewpoints, Atlanta high school seniors Lena and Campbell, one black, one white, must rely on each other to survive after a football rivalry escalates into a riot.

In Stillwater, Missippi, in 1955, thirteen-year-old African American Rose Lee Carter looks to her family and friends to understand her place in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

Abigail was the last keeper of the house and the last to know the Howland family's secrets. Now in the name of her family, she must take bitter revenge on the small-minded Southern town that shamed them but could not destroy them.

Two lonely characters, one black and one white, meet on the street and become friends.

Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves ?stuck improving,? caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process. Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school?s increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders? attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming. Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change. Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails.

Scout Finch, the young daughter of a local attorney in the Deep South during the 1930s, tells of her father's defense of an African-American man charged with the rape of a white girl.