Books like John Henry: An American Legend
By Ezra Jack Keats
For the kid who wants heroes who are bigger, stronger, and bolder than anyone else in the room, this legend delivers a giant of a man swinging a hammer with everything he's got. Larger-than-life, driving, folk-legend grandeur with a bittersweet edge.
A determined young dancer in the 1930s and 40s trains for ballet despite discriminatory schools, then refuses to paint her skin white for a company's offer — and rises to become the Met Opera's first Black prima ballerina.
A boy who longs to be a trumpeter can only play an imaginary horn, until a musician from the neighborhood night club notices his ambition and takes him seriously.
Two sisters wake before sunrise six days a week to practice tennis, pushing through boos and taunts from a sport that didn't expect them, on their way to becoming legends.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
A folk hero grows so fast he bursts through the porch roof, then grows into a legend — swinging two sledgehammers to build roads and racing a steam drill through a mountain.
A young girl rides the Silver Meteor train north during the Great Migration, watching cotton fields give way to city lights, and telling her journey stop by stop in poems.
A boy in Punjab, born with weak legs that kept him from playing cricket or walking to school, grows stronger year by year on his family's farm and eventually runs marathons at over one hundred years old.
A bricklayer works hard every day building the city, while his son works hard at school and plays at molding tiny clay bricks, until one Saturday his father surprises him with something built just for their family.
A picture-book biography traces Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s path from a childhood in the segregated South to becoming a minister and civil rights leader, told through his own powerful words.
A musical girl from small-town North Carolina, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, grows into the singer Nina Simone — her sweet voice rising into a thunderous roar of protest during the Civil Rights Movement.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
