After more deaths of black people at the hand of white police officers and white people, our country has been full of demonstrations both peaceful and violent. It is time as a nation and society for us to talk about race. Please make sure your children read books with people of other cultures in them. I did a large round-up of books with black characters and nonfiction books about black people for everyone from babies through young adult to kick this series off.
I asked some of my black teacher friends for a list of people they think every American should know about and I am working my way through that list as well as finding more people through children's books so we can educate our kids about all people and not just people who look like us. I took some of the more famous people off the list like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks as well as Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson. There were more modern people like Barrack and Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce, Michael Jordan, Shaq O'Neal, Maya Angelou and Denzel Washington. I figured most people already know about them or I have shared about them already. There were also some from the past like Madame C.J. Walker and Malcolm X, but again I have shared about them already. I wanted to look at people that we might not know about. I wanted to do people more like my post on George Edwin Taylor.
I hope you will check out these posts. These are some that I really devote much time to write and really personally care about. I try to suggest children's books to read about each of the people I share. I plan to share one each Monday and may add to the list as I find more books to share!!
- Mary Eliza Mahoney
- Gwendolyn Brooks and August Wilson
- Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes, Angie Lena Turner King, and Annie Easley
- Bryan Stevenson
- Ava DuVernay
- James Baldwin
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Claudette Colvin
- Harry Belafonte
- Josephine Baker
- Canada Lee
- Dorothy Dandridge
- Bert Williams
- Paul Robeson
- Mae Jemison
- Toni Morrison
- Mary McLeod Bethune
- John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph
- Wilma Rudolph
- Coretta Scott King
- Kamala Harris
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Mamie Phipps Clark