Black Power

Gr 9 Up—Aretha's history of the Black Power movement begins where many Civil Rights accounts leave off, with the formation of organizations that rejected nonviolence as too slow and ineffectual a means of achieving racial equality. Black Power is often associated with militancy, and both sides of that image are presented here. Aretha examines the foundations of the movement and the backlash against it, the Black Pride and Black Arts movements, and the state of Black Power in the age of Obama. Illustrations are mainly photographs, both historical and contemporary; the one exception is a page from a coloring book put out by the FBI to discredit the Black Panthers. The caption is slightly unclear, but the text resolves the matter. This is a solid introduction to a subject that teens may have read about in fiction like Kekla Magoon's The Rock and the River (S & S, 2009).—Rebecca Donnelly, Loma Colorado Public Library, Rio Rancho, NM