Akron Public Library

The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised...

A play that deals with the effect that an unexpected, large sum of money has on a poor Black family living on the South Side of Chicago.

Hare turns his bad luck around by striking a clever deal with the rich and lazy bear down the road.

Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington rose in prominence to become black America's foremost spokesman. This is the dramatic autobiographical account of Washington's struggle to succeed and prosper in a country that refused to acknowledge his existence. From his fight for an education to his founding of the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute, Up From Slavery is one of the most significant and defining works in American literature. A...

In 1954, Ishmael Chambers, a local reporter who lost an arm in the war, covers the murder trial of a Japanese American fisherman, whose wife had been Ishmael's childhood sweetheart

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her.

"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments...

A small boy enjoys playing alone in deep snow all day, and later welcomes his warm bath and snug bed-so he can go out again tomorrow!

Scottish soldier Jamie Fraser and his wife, Claire Randall, a twentieth century doctor who has traveled two centuries back in time, find themselves in South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution, where they must fight to save a young girl.