Our intention is to acquire and make available ALL picture books featuring indigenous people and people of color published in the U.S. since 2002, including reprints. Inclusion of a title in the collection DOES NOT EQUAL recommendation. See our related readings page for suggested links for evaluating books.
Under the quilt of night
A young girl flees from the farm where she has been worked as a slave and uses the Underground Railroad to escape to freedom in the north. Award-winning duo Deborah Hopkinson and James E. Ransome combine their talents once more for this sequel to the best-selling Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt. Traveling late one night, a runaway slave girl spies a quilt hanging outside a house. The quilt's center is a striking deep blue -- a sign that the people inside are willing to help her escape. Can she bravely navaigate the complex world of the Underground Railroad and lead her family to freedom?
Tucky Jo and Little Heart
A fifteen-year-old soldier in World War II meets a sweet young girl in the Philippines who helps him remember what he is fighting for as he helps her and others of her village avoid starvation, and many years later she returns his kindness
The youngest marcher
Meet the youngest known child to be arrested for a civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963, in this picture book that proves you're never too little to make a difference. Nine-year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks intended to go places and do things like anybody else. So when she heard grown-ups talk about wiping out Birmingham's segregation laws, she spoke up. As she listened to the preacher's words, smooth as glass, she sat up tall. And when she heard the plan -- picket those white stores! March to protest those unfair laws! Fill the jails!--she stepped right up and said, I'll do it! She was going to j- a-a-il!
The people shall continue
"The People Shall Continue was originally published in 1977. It is a story of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, specifically in the U.S., as they endeavor to live on lands they have known to be their traditional homelands from time immemorial. Even though the prairies, mountains, valleys, deserts, river bottomlands, forests, coastal regions, swamps and other wetlands across the nation are not as vast as they used to be, all of the land is still considered to be the homeland of the people"--Foreword
Two friends
This story imagines what it was like when Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass got together for a cup of tea and discussed their struggle for civil rights
Frederick’s journey
Traces Frederick Douglass's journey from slavery to international renown as writer and lecturer
The great expedition of Lewis and Clark
An account, told in the words of one participant, of the difficulties and wonders that were part of the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the land obtained as part of the Louisiana Purchase
Jemmy Button
Provides a fictionalized account of Jemmy Button, a native boy from Tierra del Fuego who was brought to London to be educated and then returned home to his island
Mississippi morning
Amidst the economic depression and the racial tension of the 1930s, a boy discovers a horrible secret of his father's involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. It was 1933 and life was good for James William. Piece by piece, however, his comfortable life begins to unravel. First he learns that the burning of a black man's house was not accidental. Then his fishing buddy LeRoy tells him about the hanging tree and the Klan. Though he accepts that blacks and whites can't drink from the same fountains because "that's the way it is," James William can't believe that racial hatred exists in his own community until he comes face to face with a Klan member. A thought- provoking story of one boy's loss of naivete in the face of harsh historical realities, Mississippi Morning will challenge young readers to question their own assumptions and confront personal decisions
When I was eight
This book chronicles the unbreakable spirit of an Inuit girl while attending an Arctic residential school