
Out of Darkness
by Ashley Hope Pérez
Forbidden love in Jim Crow Texas. Based on true events.
For you if
you want to understand what segregation felt like from inside it
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East Texas, 1937. Naomi, a Mexican-American girl, and Washington, a Black teenager, fall in love in a world that forbids it — against the backdrop of the New London school explosion, the deadliest school disaster in US history.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
Set in 1937 Texas, a Mexican-American girl and a Black boy in a Romeo-and-Juliet love story during the New London school explosion — the deadliest school disaster in US history. Challenged in Texas for "sexually explicit" content. The real threat: an interracial love story set in Jim Crow Texas, written by a Mexican-American woman, that makes the violence of segregation the setting rather than the backdrop.
Where This Book Lives
- Themes
- forbidden loveracism
- Topics
- jim crow era
Related Viewing
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Same event, different angle
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Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

