News About Town: At tonight’s Council Meeting (7 p.m., Town Hall) Former Councilman Reverend Larry Whitley will be approved to become a voting member of the Planning Board. Larry has served on the Planning Board as an alternate member since February 2018. Prior to serving, Rev. Whitley served two years on Matthews Town Council and is the only African American elected to Town Council to date.

News Around Town: If you’ve driven through downtown lately you may have seen a flurry of renovation work happening at the old Cafe 157 location. A new restaurant is moving in, Grace O’Malley’s. If the name wasn’t clue enough, the fare is a modern take on Irish pub food with many ingredients from local farms. (H/T to Kim Stuart O’Shea for the info.)

One Fun Thing: This Friday, March 1, jump online early to snag your tickets for Lunch with Easter Bunny. On Friday, April 12, bring your kids (ages 2 to 5) and camera for an afternoon of fun with the one and only Easter Bunny! Mr. Bunny will be hoppily posing for photos with the little ones. Tickets are $10 per person — available online or at the Matthews Community Center. The following day, Saturday, April 13, Mr. Bunny will be joined by his Mrs. for posing with kids (both the 4-legged and 2-legged kinds) from 10 a.m. til 1:00 p.m. For more information call 704-321-7275.

In honor of Black History Month, staff at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library have some suggested reading (and viewing) to help you learn about and explore the people and moments that have shaped our collective past.

HistoryMakers

Check out The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, an oral history collection highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements. It is unique among collections of African American heritage because of its large and varied scope, with interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present.

Adult Nonfiction

In A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools, Rachel Devlin tells the story of young black women who led the movement to integrate schools.
Read the true story of Josiah Henson, immortalized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War by Jared Brock.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi, winner of 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, exposes the origins of racist ideas and their role in rationalizing policies that promote racial inequality.

Adult Fiction

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the story of a young slave woman’s bid to escape the Antebellum South, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Jesmyn Ward won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing, an exploration of history and racism through the lens of a multiracial family in the rural South.
Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson, was a 2016 National Book Award finalist; it is a picture of life for a young African American woman growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s.
Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, winner of the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the story of a Cameroonian immigrant’s pursuit of the American dream in Harlem in 2007.

Young Adult Fiction and Nonfiction

Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down, longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, takes place during an elevator ride of a 15-year-old boy determined to avenge his brother’s shooting death.
Monster, Walter Dean Myer’s classic, tackles issues of race, class, gender and the judicial system with a 16-year-old black teen on trial for murder.
Dreamland Burning, by Jennifer Latham, tells intersecting stories of present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
Tony Medina’s I Am Alfonso Jones is a tale of police brutality and Black Lives Matter told in graphic novel format.
Presented in graphic novel format, the March Trilogy is Congressman John Lewis’ narrative of his experiences in the civil rights movement.

Pre-Teen Fiction and Nonfiction

Learn about Depression-era life in the South in Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper.
Mildred D. Taylor’s classic Logan Family series is set in post-Civil War Georgia and features classics The Land and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Linda Williams Jackson’s Midnight Without a Moon gives readers a glimpse of race relations in rural Mississippi in the 1950s.
In Freedom on the Menu: the Greensboro Sit-Ins, author Carole Boston Weatherford envisions the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins through the eyes of a young African American observer.

Young readers

March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine by Melba Beals
Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Stephen Alcorn
What Color Is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld

Picture Books

In the Resources section of our website you’ll find Books & Authors, where you can browse the complete list of winners of the Coretta Scott King Award, which recognizes African American authors and illustrators who express the African American experience in works for young people.