Helen Plum Library

"Historian Heather Ann Thompson offers the first definitive telling of the Attica prison uprising, the state's violent response, and the victims' decades-long quest for justice--in time for the forty-fifth anniversary of the events"-- On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, the prisoners negotiated with...

"On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the nation fixed on Detroit as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. For mainstream observers, the "riot" brought about the ruin of a once-great city, and then in 2013, the city's municipal bankruptcy served as a bailout that paved the way for Detroit to finally be rebuilt. Challenging...

Set in riot-torn, near-future Los Angeles, a nurse operates a secret, members-only emergency room for criminals

A Muslim wildlife photographer and a married south Indian Brahmin are thrown together during a bus journey when they find themselves in a middle of a Muslim riot. Their conventional beliefs are challenged and their lives are changed

"At 3:15 p.m. on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted two Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with using excessive force to subdue civilian Rodney King, and failed to reach a verdict on the same charges involving a third officer. Less than two hours later, the city of LA, a powder keg of racial tension, exploded in violence as people took to the streets in a terrifying orgy of rioting that lasted six days. In 144 hours, sixty lives were lost....

Report on the Chicago condition 3 weeks prior to the outbreak of the riots

Daniel and his mother look out of their window at the smoky night below. There are looters on the street, fires in the distance. Daniel clutches his cat, Jasmine. But later, when they're forced to leave the apartment building, Jasmine can't be found. Mrs. Kim's cat is missing too. Where are they? They can't be with each other. Those cats don't get along ... This story is about cats and people who couldn't get along until a night of rioting brings...

"When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately...

With the Rodney King riots closing in on high school senior Ashley and her family, the privileged bubble she has enjoyed, protecting her from the difficult realities most black people face, begins to crumble Los Angeles, 1992. It's the end of senior year and Ashley Bennett and her friends are spending more time at the beach than in the classroom. When four LAPD officers are acquitted after beating a black man named Rodney King half to death, violent...