Attucks! is true story of the all-black high school basketball team that broke the color barrier in segregated 1950s Indiana, masterfully told by National Book Award winner Phil Hoose. By winning the state high school basketball championship in 1955, ten teens from an Indianapolis school meant to be the centerpiece of racially segregated education in the state shattered the myth of their inferiority. Their brilliant coach had fashioned an unbeatable team from a group of boys born in the South and raised in poverty. Anchored by the astonishing Oscar Robertson, a future college and NBA star, the Crispus Attucks Tigers went down in history as the first state champions from Indianapolis and the first all-black team in U.S. history to win a racially open championship tournament—an integration they had forced with their on-court prowess. From native Hoosier and award-winning author Phillip Hoose comes this true story of a team up against impossible odds, making a difference when it mattered most. An ALA Notable Book of 2019 NYPL Best Book for Teens of 2018 A 2018 Booklist Youth Editors' Choice A Center for the Study of Multicultural Children's Literature Best Book of 2018 A Kirkus Reviews Best YA Nonfiction Book of 2018 An ALSC Notable Children's Book of 2019 A YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Nominee This title has Common Core connections.

Folder contains materials relating to Crispus Attucks High School.

In 1955, the Crispus Attucks High School basketball team won the Indiana state championship. They were the first all-Black team in the United States to win a championship in an integrated sport. The win came at a time when racial divisions in the team's hometown of Indianapolis left Black citizens with little to celebrate. The historic accomplishment gave hope to the community and paved the way for positive change in the city. This memoir offers a fascinating glimpse at Crispus Attucks's success from the players' perspective. John Gipson and Stan Patton recount what life looked like for young Black men in the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s and how racism manifested itself on and off the court. They also pay tribute to Coach Ray Crowe, whose dedication to his players created a basketball dynasty. Gipson's and Patton's story follows their teammates beyond graduation and into the successful lives they created for themselves. It also provides an inside view of competitive basketball during the era and the way former Attucks players, like the great Oscar Robertson, changed the sport forever. The Crispus Attucks team-and the men who were a part of it-will inspire basketball fans and anyone who believes in the power of sport.

Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963 On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city’s streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders’ criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can’t Wait, which tells the story of African American activism in the spring and summer of 1963. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action. Often applauded as King’s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can’t Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. Disappointed by the slow pace of school desegregation and civil rights legislation, King observed that by 1963—during which the country celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation—Asia and Africa were “moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence but we still creep at a horse-and-buggy pace.” King examines the history of the civil rights struggle, noting tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality, and asserts that African Americans have already waited over three centuries for civil rights and that it is time to be proactive: “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

Making a Mass Institution describes how Indianapolis, Indiana created a divided and unjust system of high schools over the course of the twentieth century, one that effectively sorted students geographically, economically, and racially. Like most U.S. cities, Indianapolis began its secondary system with a singular, decidedly academic high school, but ended the 1960s with multiple high schools with numerous paths to graduation. Some of the schools were academic, others vocational, and others still for what was eventually called “life adjustment.” This system mirrored the multiple forces of mass society that surrounded it, as it became more bureaucratic, more focused on identifying and organizing students based on perceived abilities, and more anxious about teaching conformity to middle-class values. By highlighting the experiences of the students themselves and the formation of a distinct, school-centered youth culture, Kyle P. Steele argues that high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students, but a complicated and ever-changing contested meeting place of all three.

Indianapolis has long been steeped in important moments in African American history, from businesswoman Madame C. J. Walker's success to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to the founding of Crispus Attucks High School, which remained segregated through the 1960s. In African Americans in Indianapolis, author and historian David Leander Williams explores this history by examining the daunting and horrendous historical events African Americans living in Indianapolis encountered between 1820 and 1970, as well as the community's determination to overcome these challenges. Revealing many events that have yet to be recorded in history books, textbooks, or literature, Williams chronicles the lives and careers of many influential individuals and the organizations that worked tirelessly to open doors of opportunity to the entire African American community. African Americans in Indianapolis serves as a reminder of the advancements that Black midwestern ancestors made toward freedom and equality, as well as the continual struggle against inequalities that must be overcome.

Recounts the life of the Black American patriot who was killed at the Boston Massacre in 1770.