100 Books Like If White Kids Die

Bud Shrake’s novel of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy Assassination is an excellent example of what I call “eyewitness fiction.” As a prominent journalist at the rabidly anti-JFK Dallas Morning News, Shrake spent time mingling with the far-right millionaires who refashioned Dallas into a “City of Hate.” Yet the politically liberal, dope-smoking Shrake was also a denizen of Dallas’s underworld and was dating the star stripper at Jack Ruby’s nightclub. From these twin worlds, he fashioned this ferocious, comically subversive portrait of Dallas in the months leading up to the assassination.

Shrake’s writing has less in common with his Texas contemporaries than it does with American novelists Ken Kesey, Charles Portis, and Kurt Vonnegut. This novel blasts off so hard it can be a bit hard for some readers to hang on in the beginning. But if you stay with it, and latch on to Shrake’s Dexedrine-fueled… show more.

This American classic by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, is read by university students worldwide. It’s set in its own time of indulgent decadence where little value is placed on the lives of individuals met by Danny Deck, the sad-sack protagonist, who denigrates his published work to the point of tearing up a copy of the novel he carries with him before drowning his own sorry self in the river of the Rio Grande. Yet, Danny is as much at fault for the sloppy treatment of the company he keeps as his company is for being disingenuous.   

What McMurtry calls normal life, or mundane happiness, through the voice of novelist Deck, is seen as obtainable if one wants to pursue the creative arts. His conclusion is that the two simply don’t mix. As he explores this idea in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, Deck sets about self-destructing, which has nothing to do… show more.

I’m cheating a bit here because this book is set in the Japan and Okinawa, rather than Texas. But Sarah Bird is one of Texas’s most beloved writers, and this exquisite novel about the college-aged, Vietnam War-protesting daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, is one of the finest novels written by anyone from Texas. Bird captures the mood of the Vietnam era with empathy and wonderful humor, but beyond that, The Yokota Officers Club is a deeply affecting story about families, about love, loss, and the hope of redemption. It’s a transcendent novel that feels both intimate and sweeping. Sarah Bird has written several fine books but this one is her masterpiece.

William Hauptman is a Tony Award-winning playwright and the author of one of my all-time favorite Texas novels, The Storm Season, about a tornado chaser in Wichita Falls during the Reagan era as the middle class is dissolving.

Journey to the West is a diamond-sharp autobiographical novel based on Hauptman’s experiences leaving his conservative hometown of Wichita Falls to go to college at the University of Texas in Austin. He arrives just as the sixties begin taking off, and soon his mind gets blown and his life upended. Hauptman writes so well of this quintessential experience that so many people have when they go to college and taste freedom for the first time in their lives. The novel/memoir follows our hero as he ends up in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, starving and strung out. Hauptman, is a first-class writer and this is one of his coolest… show more.

I chose this picture book because it’s so well-written (including an unforgettable kid-friendly explanation of “Jim Crow”), because it’s a first-hand account by someone who took part in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery when she was only four years old, and because I liked the way the author showed the organizers as an “orchestra” composed of leaders such as Dorothy Cotton, Ralph Abernathy, and her own parents, Andrew and Jean Childs Young, rather than a solo act by Martin Luther King.

I wanted a good middle-grade book to introduce my son to the Birmingham Children’s March.   Doing so was important to me since his mother grew up in Birmingham, a little girl in 1963.  Levinson’s book features the stories of four children, one who was my wife’s schoolmate, who marched and were fire-hosed. With historical photographs and interviews, the book is an inviting and moving introduction for middle-graders to the why and how of the Movement and the bravery of the youngest activists.

Poor Black farmers and sharecroppers lined the route of Martin Luther King’s famous march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, an epic protest that drew thousands of white supporters and led to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Hasan Jeffries beautifully recaptures these local people’s struggle for political power and economic self-determination. This book made plain to me as has no other just why and where Black Power was the only option. Local people creatively won support from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and challenged Lowndes County’s courthouse cliques and agricultural committees, powerful agencies set up of, by, and for wealthy white planters under New Deal federal crop subsidy programs. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was the original Black Panther Party that later inspired legions of local northern activists.

In May 1963, three thousand African American children allowed themselves to be arrested in Birmingham, Alabama to protest segregation. The youngest, Audrey Faye Hendricks, was an elementary school student. This picture book biography tells the story of how she came to march with a bunch of high schoolers and about the bravery she had to summon up for her stay in jail.

We live in a time when personal convenience seems to trump everything else. So how is it that virtually the entire Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, stayed off the city buses for over a year in the mid-1950s?

The first three chapters of this book answer that question in a completely new way that made the realities of the Jim Crow South and the dangers of the struggle for racial justice snap into focus for me. The boycott was tangentially about segregation on buses, but really, argues McGuire, it was a fight for bodily integrity, safety, and self-respect.

Because it deals with rape and sexual assault, this can be a hard book to read, but it literally gave me a different understanding of what “equality” means.

In a clever move, Charlie Cobb uses the form of a travel guide—I love it better than a Lonely Planet—to introduce the events and people of the 1960s Civil Rights struggles. An active participant, Cobb takes us into, behind, and around the sit-ins, the formation of SNCC, campaigns for voting rights, Mississippi Summer of 1964, and other day-by-day battles for Civil Rights. We meet close up and learn about the work of the young people, many unknown and unsung, whose determination and daring carried the Movement forward. And, yes, the book also provides many pictures and documents, as well as a “guided tour” of the homes, churches, shops, and bars where the real action happened.