Central Kansas Library System

"Race Cars is a children's book about white privilege created to help facilitate tough conversations with their kids about race, privilege and oppression. It tells the story of two best friends, a white car and a black car, that have different experiences and face different rules while entering the same race. This book is important because as early as 6 months, a baby's brain can notice race-based differences, by ages 2 to 4, children can internalize...

"The Flanagan sisters are as different as they come. Seventeen-year-old Annalie is bubbly, sweet, and self-conscious, whereas nineteen-year-old Margaret is sharp and assertive. Margaret looks just like their mother, while Annalie passes for white and looks like the father who abandoned them years ago, leaving their Chinese immigrant mama to raise the girls alone in their small, predominantly white Midwestern town. When their house is vandalized with...

America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin. "It's time we right this unacceptable wrong," says Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo. His participation in the civil rights movement...

From the Publisher: In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this important work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, we find King's acute analysis of American race relations and the state of the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts. King lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams...

"We shall overcome" was the refrain of the Civil Rights Movement, but overcoming centuries of discrimination was not easy. When the activism of civil rights protestors exposed the rampant racism embedded in America’s politics for the world to see, political leaders in the federal government were forced to act. In Changing Laws: Politics of the Civil Rights Era, students ages 12 to 15 explore the key legislative and judicial victories of the era...

"In The Solace of Water, Elizabeth Byler Younts tells the story of two women, one white and one black, in racially charged 1956, who fight personal battles of freedom and form a friendship that neither expected.After the loss of her young son, Carver, an African-American preacher's wife named Delilah Evans moves with her family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Sinking Creek, Pennsylvania, for a fresh start. The last thing she could have imagined was becoming...

Former prosecutor Penn Cage and his fiancee, reporter and publisher Caitlin Masters, have barely escaped with their lives after being attacked by wealthy businessman Brody Royal and his Double Eagles, a KKK sect with ties to some of Mississippi's most powerful men. But the real danger has only begun as FBI Special Agent John Kaiser warns Penn that Brody wasn't the true leader of the Double Eagles. The puppeteer who actually controls the terrorist...

"From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University's library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade,...

War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War-race-while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book . . . a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan." Drawing on...

"In this high-interest novel for teen readers, a young teen is thrilled when she gets into art school but shocked to learn that some students feel she doesn't belong there." --