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After taking the train downtown, Lizzie spends the day at the public library, helping her mother who is a children's librarian.

Momma describes the special people and surroundings of her childhood, in a place where the edge of town met the countryside, in a time when all the children at school were brown.

When she goes looking for "something beautiful" in her city neighborhood, a young girl finds beauty in many different forms.

A little girl introduces her best friend through a collection of thirteen poems.

A collection of thirteen of Langston Hughes poems on African American themes.

Growing up in a city neighborhood, fifteen-year-old Joyce, unsure of herself and not quite comfortable with her maturing body, tries to find a place to belong and a way to express herself through dance.

A collection of poems exploring the sounds, sights, and emotions enlivening a African-American neighborhood during the course of one evening.

Jamila and her little sister are frightened by the loud city noises at their new apartment, but they find comfort in recalling the stories their great-grandma used to tell about life in Africa.

Two boys find a pair of lensless motorcycle goggles and, with the help of their dog, elude the bigger boys who try to steal them from them.

After she and her parents move to an ethnically mixed inner city neighborhood, ten-year-old Joy and her new friend Neesha decide to do something to keep drug dealers off their block.

After her mother is sent to jail, eighth-grader Patrice Williams moves to Chicago to live with her aunt Mae where she attends a school filled with gangs and drug runners, applies for a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, and learns there is hope for her future.

Mimi and her little brother Joe escape from home and the city's summer heat to read and dream about princesses and dinosaurs in the cool, quiet library.

Describes the creation and history of "sundown towns, " American towns where African-Americans were outlawed after dark, in some cases as late as the 1970s; examines their effect on whites, African-Americans, and the social system; and discusses their continued existence, arguing the importance of integration.

A story set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years.

When Sofie calls her grandmother in Senegal on Sundays, she complains about the ugliness of the city she now lives in, but her life changes when she makes a new friend.