Mississippi Sissy

Mississippi Sissy
Author: Kevin Sessums
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780312341022

Kevin Sessums recounts his childhood and adolescence in the South, explaining how he coped with being different from the other boys in the region and how he refused to accept their labels and discriminations.

Dispatches from Pluto

Dispatches from Pluto
Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476709645

New Yorkers Grant and his girlfriend Mariah decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. This is their journey of discovery to a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters, capture the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, and delve deeply into the Delta's lingering racial tensions. As the nomadic Grant learns to settle down, he falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home.

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Coming of Age in Mississippi
Author: Anne Moody
Publisher: Dell
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2011-09-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307803589

The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement—a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person’s ability to affect change. “Anne Moody’s autobiography is an eloquent, moving testimonial to her courage.”—Chicago Tribune Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till’s lynching. Before then, she had “known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was . . . the fear of being killed just because I was black.” In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life. A straight-A student who realized her dream of going to college when she won a basketball scholarship, she finally dared to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC, she experienced firsthand the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement—and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs, and deadly force that were used to destroy it. A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation’s destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement. Praise for Coming of Age in Mississippi “A history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed . . . a timely reminder that we cannot now relax.”—Senator Edward Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review “Something is new here . . . rural southern black life begins to speak. It hits the page like a natural force, crude and undeniable and, against all principles of beauty, beautiful.”—The Nation “Engrossing, sensitive, beautiful . . . so candid, so honest, and so touching, as to make it virtually impossible to put down.”—San Francisco Sun-Reporter

Hattiesburg

Hattiesburg
Author: William Sturkey
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674976355

Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist “An insightful, powerful, and moving book.” —Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice “Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.” —New York Times If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South. “Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk “When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history...William Sturkey is one of those historians...A brilliant, poignant work.” —Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History

Long Division

Long Division
Author: Kiese Laymon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982174838

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).

Southern Cross the Dog

Southern Cross the Dog
Author: Bill Cheng
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062225030

In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young man must choose between the lure of the future and the claims of the past. Having lost virtually everything in the fearsome storm—home, family, first love—Robert Chatham embarks on an odyssey that takes him through the deep South, from the desperation of a refugee camp to the fiery and raucous brothel Hotel Beau-Miel and into the Mississippi hinterland, where he joins a crew hired to clear the swamp and build a dam. Along his journey he encounters piano-playing hustlers, ne’er-do-well Klansmen, well-intentioned whores, and a family of fur trappers, the L’Etangs, whose very existence is threatened by the swamp-clearing around them. The L’Etang brothers are fierce and wild but there is something soft about their cousin Frankie, possibly the only woman capable of penetrating Robert’s darkest places and overturning his conviction that he’s marked by the devil. Teeming with language that renders both the savage beauty and complex humanity of our shared past, Southern Cross the Dog is a tour de force that heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

Mississippi Trial, 1955

Mississippi Trial, 1955
Author: Chris Crowe
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2002-05-27
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1440650314

As the fiftieth anniversary approaches, there's a renewed interest in this infamous 1955 murder case, which made a lasting mark on American culture, as well as the future Civil Rights Movement. Chris Crowe's IRA Award-winning novel and his gripping, photo-illustrated nonfiction work are currently the only books on the teenager's murder written for young adults.

The Help

The Help
Author: Kathryn Stockett
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2011
Genre: African American women
ISBN: 0425245136

Original publication and copyright date: 2009.

If You're So Smart How Come You Can't Spell Mississippi? (A Book About Dyslexia)

If You're So Smart How Come You Can't Spell Mississippi? (A Book About Dyslexia)
Author: Barbara Esham
Publisher: Mainstream Connections
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2012-12-13
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1603364528

ADHD, ADD, Dyslexia, Learning Styles, Learning Disabilities Introduces the mainstream student and educator to the world of the child who struggles academically. The main character discovers her father is dyslexic, as is one of her classmates-- and she tries to make sense of it.

Hamsters, Shells, and Spelling Bees

Hamsters, Shells, and Spelling Bees
Author: Lee Bennett Hopkins
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2008-05-27
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0060741120

From the very first day of the school year, there is so much to do! So grab your backpack, hop on that school bus, and don't forget your lunch. Whether you're practicing for the spelling bee or getting ready for the big school play, there isn't a moment to lose! Lee Bennett Hopkins delivers an assortment of twenty spectacular poems from writers such as Jane Yolen, Alice Schertle, and J. Patrick Lewis that are perfect for show-and-tell. Sachiko Yoshikawa's vivid illustrations are sure to delight the whole class!