Books about group based injustice and struggles for justice. These include stories about BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) who experience and/or resist enslavement, internment, imprisonment, or violent conflict; persecution in or forced displacement from their homelands; or barriers to basic freedoms such as land, food, housing, education, health & wellness, and bodily autonomy. source: https://diversebookfinder.org/our-categories/
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage, his mother was sold away and he was robbed of all memory of her, but gifted with a mysterious power that saves his life years later when he almost drowns in a river. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion, and so begins a journey into the war on slavery. It begins a journey that takes him from the corrupt Deep South to dangerous movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram resolves to rescue the family he left behind.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
The Sun Does Shine: how I found life and freedom on death row by Anthony Ray Hinton
A man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit describes how he became a victim of a flawed legal system, recounting the years he shared with fellow inmates who were eventually executed before his exoneration.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
The Black and the Blue: a cop reveals the crimes, racism and injustice in America's law enforcement by Matthew Horace
A CNN contributor, and former law-enforcement himself, offers a personal account of the racism, crimes and color lines that challenge America's law enforcement, sharing insights into high-profile cases, the Black Lives Matter movement and what is needed for change.
Stony Road: reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr
The NAACP Image Award-winning creator of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross presents a revisionist chronicle of America's post-Civil War struggle for racial equality and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated black Americans throughout the 20th century.
Libby -- E-Book
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
When a pregnant Tish's boyfriend Fonny, a sculptor, is wrongfully jailed for the rape of a Puerto Rican woman, their families unite to prove the charge false
Libby -- E-Book
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.
Libby -- E-Book
Evicted: poverty and profit in the American city by Matthew Desmond
A Harvard sociologist examines the under-represented challenge of eviction as a formidable cause of poverty in America, revealing how millions of people are wrongly forced from their homes and reduced to cycles of extreme disadvantage that are reinforced by dysfunctional legal systems.
Libby -- E-Book
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should—and could—be taught to American students.
Libby -- E-Book
hoopla-- E-Book
Central America’s Forgotten History: revolution, violence, and the roots of migration by Aviva Chomsky
Places Central American migration to the United States in the context of the region's history of conquest, colonialism, revolution, and neoliberalism, looking especially at the revolutionary experiments of the 1980s and their aftermath.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Told through the author's own evolving understanding of the subject over the course of his life comes a bold and personal investigation into America's racial history and its contemporary echoes.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
Examines how systematic racism impacted both the life and death of the 46-year old black man who was murdered in broad daylight outside a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin.
Exit West: a novel by Mohsin Hamid
Presents the story of two young lovers whose furtive affair is shaped by local unrest on the eve of a civil war that erupts in a cataclysmic bombing attack, forcing them to abandon their previous home and lives.
Libby -- E-book | E-audiobook
March. Book One by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin; Art by Nate Powell
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movemen
Libby -- E-book | Hoopla -- E-audiobook