Open Books Open Minds (2022/2023) - The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

One of the first novels to be published by an African-American woman, this is a compelling tale of what life was like for African-Americans during the time of the Civil War and afterwards. Harper is able to closely scrutinize the social pressures of the time, making the difficult decision to quit "passing" for white and accepting her mixed-race ethnicity.

Although he appeared to most observers to be white, American author Charles Waddell Chestnutt had some African-American ancestry and thus was subjected to the limited opportunities, discrimination, and segregated living conditions that faced African-Americans in the United States throughout his life. An accomplished writer, Chestnutt created The House Behind the Cedars as a means of trying to depict the multidimensional complexity of race relations in the nineteenth-century American South. Recommended for fans of literary realism and social issue novels.

Known only as the "Ex-Colored Man," the protagonist in Johnson's novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or "passing" as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing.

First published to critical acclaim in 1929, Passing firmly established Nella Larsen's prominence among women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Passing is a story of two women who cross the color line in 1920s New York - together with a new Introduction by the Obie Award-winning playwright and novelist Ntozake Shange.

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement's most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don't fade with the color of one's skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

What would happen to the race problem in America if black people turned white? Would everybody be happy? Black No More is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black.

Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they speak their own language, yet Birdie, with her light skin and straight hair, is often mistaken for white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at school. Despite their differences, Cole is Birdie's confidant, her protector, the mirror by which she understands herself. Then their parents' marriage collapses. One night Birdie watches her father and his new girlfriend drive away with Cole. Soon Birdie and her mother are on the road as well, drifting across the country in search of a new home. But for Birdie, home will always be Cole. Haunted by the loss of her sister, she sets out a desperate search for the family that left her behind.

Patricia 'Pinky' Johnson returns to her home in the South after studying nursing in New England. When her grandmother's boss, Miss Em, becomes ill, Pinky cares for her. Miss Em leaves her estate to her, but Pinky faces a long court battle to keep it.

Based on the true story of a light-skinned black family who pass for white in a New Hampshire town.