Lynne Thigpen

The rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines--from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...

As the novel begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women...

A black family of five moves into an enormous house once used as a hiding place for runaway slaves. Mysterious sounds and events as well as the discovery of secret passageways make the family believe they are in grave danger.

The author describes her odyssey to Ghana in the 1960s, meant as a return to her African roots. Over a few years she transformed herself by learning to speak Fanti, dressing in Ghanian style and delving in politics. But after encountering racial prejudice and losing her son in a car crash, she returned to America.

A compilation, selected from various sources and arranged chronologically, of the reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their experiences from the leaving of Africa through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century. Paired with historical commentary and powerful paintings, Julius Lester's book presents what it felt like to be a slave in America through the words of black men and women who lived it rather than filtering through the eyes...

This distinguished sequel to the Newbery Award-winning book Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry was nominated for a National Book Award and recognized as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. In her series of books about the Logan family, Taylor draws a stirring portrait of the history of black Americans—and the small successes that led to the great Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties. Life in the South was turbulent and frightening

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Greeder's summer at her uncle's farm is made special because of her friendship with a very tall, composed woman who raises hogs and who closely resembles the magazine photograph of a Watutsi queen.

Program 1: Bear and his friends discover opposites. Program 2: The gang befriends a little bat named Benny, and they learn that different can be good. Program 3: Everybody at the big blue house works together to organize a fund-raiser for the muskrats' charity.

Winner of several Obie Awards, Tintypes [1981] is a treasure chest of popular tunes from the time when sheet music was king. The five cast members portray a myriad of character types drawn from American society during the age of ragtime, including Teddy Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, and Anna Held, evoking the pride, nostalgia, suffering and optimism felt by Americans at the start of the last century.