Carroll, Rebecca, ed., with a foreword by Ntozake Shange, Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America, Crown, 1997.

This collection of nonfiction first-person narratives about the lives of fifteen girls, aged eleven to eighteen, from all across America, addresses issues of self-esteem, identity, and values, offering an authentic portrait of contemporary black girlhood.

Haskins, Jim, Separate but Not Equal: The Dream and the

Struggle, Scholastic, 1997.

Tracing back from the 1957 crisis in Little Rock to explore the history of segregated education, Haskins sets a thorough context for the school integration crisis of the 1950s—1970s and also covers the landmark cases of the struggle. This book is aimed specifically at a high-school audience.

Landry, Bart, The New Black Middle Class, University of

California Press, 1987.

In this in-depth academic study, sociologist Landry describes the rise of an elite and privileged class of African Americans...