Rose takes a gift from the crazy old Birdman and discovers that even in the bleak, gray city there are ways to make a beautiful garden.

Fleeing Southerland Plantation with his little sister, twelve-year-old Homer finds a secret community called Freewater, created by formerly enslaved people, but when he learns of a threat that could destroy this place, he crafts a plan to help his new home.

"In a small but turbulent Louisiana town, one boy's grief takes him beyond the bayous of his backyard, to learn that there is no right way to be yourself"--

"A biracial girl finally gets the chance to meet the African American side of her family"--

Addy and her mother forgo their Christmas plans to help the newly freed slaves arriving in Philadelphia during the Civil War.

In the post-Civil War South, a young African American girl is determined to prove that she can go to school just like her older brothers.

Eleven-year-old Ella seeks information about her father while enjoying a visit with her mother, a jazz singer, in Boston in 1944, then returns to the harsh realities of segregated, small-town South Carolina.

Florrie's daddy used to be a stage actor in Harlem before the Depression forced the Lafayette Theater to close, but he gets a chance to act again when Orson Welles reopens the theater to stage an all-black version of Macbeth.

In 1864, after her father and brother are sold to another owner, nine-year-old Addy Walker and her mother escape from their cruel life as slaves in North Carolina to freedom in Philadelphia.

A fictionalized account of how in 1849 a Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, escapes to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia.