- Why a Saudi blogger faces a possible death sentence for three tweets
- America's big wealth gap: Is it good, bad, or irrelevant?
- Xi Jinping, future Chinese president, faces test on first White House visit (+video)
- Iran accuses Israel of setting up attacks on its own diplomats
- Valentine's Day: cost of romance rising for flower delivery, 4 other things
- No budget? No problem! The strange politics behind a budgetless America.
The shifting 'canon' of multicultural lit
It's not easy to assemble a reading list of books dealing with racial discrimination. For many years, for instance, "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee had an unquestioned place in classrooms. The 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel portrays the trial of a black man in a southern town and offers an unqualified condemnation of racism. Yet today, some say it is patronizing. The writer is white, the narrator is white, and a noble (and educated) white man defends an innocent (but uneducated) black man.
Recently, memoirs have become popular. Students are often drawn to books like "Down These Mean Streets," by Piri Thomas, the true story of a Puerto Rican growing up in East Harlem who struggles as he learns what it means to have black skin in America. But many parents object to the book's tales of drug use and homosexual prostitutes.
Despite these difficulties, teachers are working hard to craft reading lists. Here is a sampling of literature that teachers use in their classrooms today.
Classics that are now often challenged:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain (1885)
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee (1960)
Black Like Me
by John Howard Griffin (1960)
Sounder
by William Howard Armstrong (1969)
Works considered classics today, but once challenged:
Native Son (1940)
Black Boy (1945)
by Richard Wright
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison (1952)
A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
by Dee Brown (1970)
'New classics' on black-white relations, by black writers:
Beloved
by Toni Morrison (1987)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou (1970)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, 'rediscovered' in the late '60s)
First-person nonfiction accounts by black authors:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)
The AutoBiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Manchild in the Promised Land
by Claude Brown (1965)
Down These Mean Streets
by Piri Thomas
(1967)
Black Ice
by Lorene Carey (1972) Kaffir Boy
by Mark Mathabane (1989)
Gifted Hands
by Ben Carson with Cecil Murphy (1990)
Makes Me Wanna Holler
Page: 1 | 2 
