The world of law enforcement and criminal justice in the South during the Jim Crow Era was vastly different than it is today, and segregation was especially difficult for black police officers who were challenged to enforce laws. William J. Day was one of the first 10 African American police officers in Savannah, GA. His story is one of courage, fortitude and dedication to his career and his family. In May, 1947, he joined the Savannah police department. In those days of segregation, severe limits were placed on black law enforcement officers. There were segregated drinking fountains in precinct stations. Black policemen were allowed to patrol only in black communities, and had to call in a commander if they arrested a white suspect. White officers would steam-clean the seats of their police cruisers after black officers had driven them. “The black officers were reduced to automatic civilian status when they walked off the job,” recalls his son, Charles E. Day, Sr. “My father had to deal with it, plus keep a job and raise a family.” William and Laura raised a family of four sons, one of whom was an invalid. Laura had studied nursing, but gave up her career to care for her family. She was always home for her children and the home was always filled with friends and good food. William J. Day, Sr. passed away in April 1972, just shy of his 60th birthday. As his son Charles approached his own 60th birthday, he wanted to memorialize the legacy of his father and pay tribute to a remarkable man. This book is written about this father’s life and his family. The Tenth Man: Living in Black and Blue tells the story of this era in Southern history, the city of Savannah, GA, the civil rights movement and the lives of people who endured these hardships.

The story of a man who buys his life in a moment of fear set in wartime occupied France.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S TOP TEN NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK SELECTION • A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE BOOK SELECTION One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

The world of law enforcement and criminal justice in the South during the Jim Crow Era was vastly different than it is today, and segregation was especially difficult for black police officers who were challenged to enforce laws. William J. Day was one of the first 10 African American police officers in Savannah, GA. His story is one of courage, fortitude and dedication to his career and his family. In May, 1947, he joined the Savannah police department. In those days of segregation, severe limits were placed on black law enforcement officers. There were segregated drinking fountains in precinct stations. Black policemen were allowed to patrol only in black communities, and had to call in a commander if they arrested a white suspect. White officers would steam-clean the seats of their police cruisers after black officers had driven them. "The black officers were reduced to automatic civilian status when they walked off the job," recalls his son, Charles E. Day, Sr. "My father had to deal with it, plus keep a job and raise a family." William and Laura raised a family of four sons, one of whom was an invalid. Laura had studied nursing, but gave up her career to care for her family. She was always home for her children and the home was always filled with friends and good food. William J. Day, Sr. passed away in April 1972, just shy of his 60th birthday. As his son Charles approached his own 60th birthday, he wanted to memorialize the legacy of his father and pay tribute to a remarkable man. This book is written about this father's life and his family. The Tenth Man: Living in Black and Blue tells the story of this era in Southern history, the city of Savannah, GA, the civil rights movement and the lives of people who endured these hardships.