Reading Books to See and Love Our Neighbors

“I want to get texts about African-American experience in my classroom, and I’m in a conservative Christian school. Any appropriate recommendations?” In the last week I’ve seen this plea in my English teacher social media groups multiple times. My expertise is limited, having garnered my 30 years of teaching experience in international Christian schools in Japan, working to diversify my library in terms of national representation (see this blog on reading about Japan). Still, I do have a few answers, and I’m always glad to gather more. (I received some great suggestions after my recent blog about making the transition from high school into middle school.) So, here are a few excellent books, new and old, for middle and high school readers.

Middle School, New

• New Kid by Jerry Craft—Graphic novel about Jordan Banks, a 7th grader, navigating his first year at a largely white school.  
• The Crossover (Newberry Medal) and Booked by Kwame Alexander. Novels in verse about basketball and soccer respectively, as well as about life.
• Ghost by Jason Reynolds (National Book Award finalist). Four friends on an elite middle school track team.
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Memoir in verse.

Middle School, Classic

• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (Newberry Medal) Farming family in Mississippi in the Depression.
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis. (Newberry Honor) A family from Michigan visits their grandma in Alabama in the fateful summer of 1963. 
• Bud Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis: (Newberry Award) during the depression, an orphan boy runs away from an abusive foster home to search for a home

High School, New

• Piecing Me Together by Angela Watson. Fiction. 
• March by John Lewis. Graphic novel 3-volume history of the Civil Rights movement as it intersected with John Lewis’s life.
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Nonfiction.
• Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals. Memior of one of the students who integrated the Little Rock high school.
• Monster by Walter Dean Myer. Fiction.
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Nonfiction.
• Life Is So Good by George Dawson. Autobiography.
• The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore.

High School, Classic

• Narrative of the Life of Frederik Douglass. An 11th grade Japanese student once demanded passionately of me, “Why did nobody make us read this earlier?”
• “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963) 
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Drama.

Books have been called both mirrors and windows—mirrors where we learn more about ourselves, and windows that give us a glimpse into the lives of others. That second bit can play a huge role in our obedience to Jesus’ second greatest commandment. It helps us really see and understand the neighbors we are to love. As Frederick Beuchner said in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith, “If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces, but the life within and behind their faces” (27).

When we see that life and it involves pain, we can no longer be indifferent. Elie Wiesel, concentration camp survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient tells us that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. The Bible records that when Job’s friends—even the ones who later turned out to be horrible comforters—saw his suffering, they sat with him, speechless, for 7 days. These books can help us sit with our suffering fellow humans—image bearers of God every one.

Another great book, not American but South African, a book I have taught many times, ends with these words of impatient hope: “The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why that is a secret” (Alan Paton. Cry, the Beloved Country, 312).

Bring on the dawn.