In segregated 1950s Nashville, a young African American girl braves a series of indignities and obstacles to get to one of the few integrated places in town: the public library.

Growing up in the segregated town of Clarksville, Tennessee, in the 1960s, Alta's family cannot afford to buy her new sneakers--but she still plans to attend the parade celebrating her hero Wilma Rudolph's three Olympic gold medals.

Eleven-year-old Ella seeks information about her father while enjoying a visit with her mother, a jazz singer, in Boston in 1944, then returns to the harsh realities of segregated, small-town South Carolina.

"In this historical fiction picture book, Ella Mae and her cousin Charlotte, both African American, start their own shoe store when they learn that they cannot try on shoes at the shoe store"--

Ten-year-old African American boy wants to welcome the circus elephant named Miss Fancy to her new home in a nearby park, but he is disappointed to see a sign: "No Colored Allowed".

Fourteen-year-old Samantha and her mother move to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962 after her father is killed in Vietnam, and during the year they spend there Sam encounters both love and hate as she learns about photography from a new friend of her mother's and witnesses the prejudice and violence of the segregationists of the South.

Twelve-year-old Treasure Daniels and her younger sister must move in with Great-aunt Grace until their mother sorts herself out, but life in Black Lake, Virginia, where segregation lingers, is hard and Grace is a nightmare--at least on the surface.

Although she really wants to go to school, walking the five miles is very difficult for Mabel Jean and the other black children, so she tries to find a way to get a bus for them the same as the white children have. Based on real events in Mississippi.

Teenager Biddy Owens' 1948 journal about working for the Birmingham Black Barons includes the games and the players, racism the team faces from New Orleans to Chicago, and his family's resistance to his becoming a professional baseball player. Includes a historical note about the evolution of the Negro Leagues.

"When thirteen-year-old Billie Sims learns that the Freedom Riders, a civil rights group protesting segregation on buses in the summer of 1961, will be traveling through Anniston, Alabama, she thinks change could be coming to her stubborn town. But what starts as angry grumbles soon turns to brutality, and Billie is forced to reconsider her own views"--