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This month, flip through the pages of black history

In February, Black History Month, publishers release a flood of books about or by African Americans. USA TODAY recommends a dozen new titles for all ages.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95, for ages 12 and up) by Phillip Hoose celebrates a little-known civil-rights pioneer who at 15 defied segregation on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., nearly a year before Rosa Parks would. Colvin, now a retired nurse in New York, gets to tell her own story, and the larger context is explained by Hoose.

In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (Crown, $27.50) by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes how ancestors of most black Americans were "anonymous, decent, overly hardworking people whose lives have yet to be chronicled." In interviews, Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock and other celebrities describe explorations of their family histories. A companion to the 2008 PBS series African American Lives....
Read entire article at USA Today