Book Recommendations to Keep the Conversation on Race Going

TeachingBooks’ recently created an exhaustive list of children’s literature pieces that can support parents and caregivers who want to have conversations surrounding “race, racism, and resistance” with their kids. Based on this site’s recommendations, we picked out just a few that we think would be great additions to your bookshelves:

For Pre-School & Kindergarteners

• We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga – For kids to discover more about the Cherokee culture
• The Day You Begin – For kids to love themselves and their stories, and to celebrate both the similarities and differences they have with peers around them
• Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story about Racial Injustice – Explores police brutality, discrimination, and helps children identify and counter racial injustice in their own lives

For Elementary School-Aged Readers

• Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History – This is one title in a series of three books, each highlighting leaders big and small who contributed to making the world a better place
• Harlem's Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills - According to Amazon, this is “a timeless story about justice, equality, and the importance of following one's heart and dreams”
• Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library – The true story of the Afro-Puerto Rican scholar, poet, and author who turned his home library into what is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library
• Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family's Fight for Desegregation – The true story of a young Hispanic-American woman and her family, and how they helped bring about an end to school segregation in California

For Middle & High School Youth

• Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement - TeachingBooks writes, “A biography in poems as activist Fannie Lou Hamer follows her path from a childhood of working cotton in a family of sharecroppers to her emergence as a civil rights activist and politician working to secure voting rights and representation for African Americans in Mississippi and nationally”
• Young Water Protectors: A Story About Standing Rock – An inspiring story of a young Native American, with themes of environmental responsibility and the celebration of indigenous people groups