Adult Nonfiction

Zimring, Franklin E. When Police Kill. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Franklin Zimring compiles data from federal records, crowdsourced research, and investigative journalism to provide a comprehensive, fact-based picture of how, when, where, and why police resort to deadly force. Of the 1,100 killings by police in the United States in 2015, he shows, 85 percent were fatal shootings and 95 percent of victims were male. The death rates for African Americans and Native Americans are twice their share of the population.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: an American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty- first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.

Chang, Je . We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Re- segregation. Picador, 2016.

Through deep reporting with key activists and thinkers, passionately personal writing and distinguished cultural criticism, We Gon’ Be Alright links #BlackLivesMatter to #OscarsSoWhite, Ferguson to Washington D.C., the Great Migration to resurgent nativism. Chang explores the rise and fall of the idea of “diversity”, the roots of student protest, changing ideas about Asian Americanness and the impact of a century of racial separation in housing. He argues that resegregation is the unexamined condition of our time, the undoing of which is key to moving the nation forward to racial justice and cultural equity.

Lowery, Wesley. They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement. Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

A behind-the-scenes account of the #BlackLivesMatter movement shares insights into the young men and women behind it, citing the racially charged controversies that have motivated members and the economic, political and personal histories that inform its purpose.

McSpadden, Lezley. Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil: The Life, Legacy, and Love of My Son Michael Brown. Regan Arts, 2016.

When Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown was born, he was adored and doted on by his aunts, uncles, grandparents, his father and most of all by his sixteen-year-old mother, who nicknamed him Mike Mike. McSpadden never imagined that her son’s name would inspire the resounding chants of protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and ignite the global conversation about the disparities in the American policing system. In Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil, McSpadden picks up the pieces of the tragedy that shook her life and the country to their core and reveals the unforgettable story of her life, her son and their truth.