Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

This novel begins in the 1700s with a Ghanaian woman, Maame, who has two daughters by two different men. These half-sisters don’t know each other, and their descendants lead radically different lives. One line remains in Africa until the late 20th century. The other ends up enslaved in the United States. Both lines experience slavery’s evil as victims and perpetrators. Although moments of love—and even gospel hope—appear in this multigenerational story, they are overshadowed by ugliness and examples of Christian hypocrisy. An unrelenting portrait of slavery, this novel also shows the capacity of people to justify it to themselves.

Hidden Figures

Margot Lee Shetterly

At the beginning of World War II, Langley—the aeronautics laboratory in Hampton, Va.—couldn’t find enough qualified engineers and mathematicians. Then President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order opening up defense jobs to African-Americans, and a stream of men and women entered them. Shetterly tells the stories of a handful of black female mathematicians who worked their way up Langley’s hierarchy, while living in segregated neighborhoods and facing the daily indignities of segregated restrooms and cafeterias. Shetterly’s well-footnoted history shines light on this little-known chapter. For those intimidated by the sometimes confusing narrative, a movie version is out.

Counting Descent

Clint Smith

This slim volume offers poems that range from bitter to angry and funny. In “Counterfactual,” Smith tells of how he was 12 and playing Super Soakers with his white friends in a hotel parking lot. His father comes out and drags him inside: “Told me I couldn’t be out here acting the same as these white boys—can’t be pretending to shoot guns, can’t be running in the dark, can’t be hiding behind anything other than your own teeth.” Other poems describe police stops, taxis unwilling to stop, and everyday family moments. Occasionally they offer a glimmer of hope.

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

John Lewis

Reissued in 2015, this 1998 memoir provides a vivid first-person account of key people and crucial events in the fight for civil rights. Raised in the church, Lewis later embraced the social gospel and what he called the “Spirit of History.” While in college in Nashville he committed himself to nonviolence. Through sit-ins, beatings, and multiple unjust arrests, Lewis led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—even as others turned to violent protest. The book includes some crude epithets, but it’s really disturbing because the events he recounts are horrific. Even those who disagree with Lewis’ theology or politics should admire his courage.

AFTERWORD

Andrew Aydin, John Lewis, and illustrator Nate Powell collaborated on March, a three-volume graphic novel based on John Lewis’ memoir Walking with the Wind. Book Three came out in 2016 and won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The trilogy opens with John Lewis—who entered Congress in 1987 and is still there—preparing to attend Barack Obama’s inauguration. Over the course of three volumes he remembers many episodes from the 1960s that opened the way for the first black president.

The books show scenes of lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, murders, beatings and arrests, and the march from Selma to Montgomery. They also introduce the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Although the graphic novels omit details found in the 500-page memoir, the illustrations—though not realistic—crank up the emotional intensity. This valuable account includes lots of violence, a short discussion of sex, and an abundance of the N-word from white racists. Best for mature teens and adults. —S.O.