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In this spoken word piece, Elizabeth Acevedo addresses the beauty standard that is epitomized by fair skin and straight hair.

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was pulled over by police near Saint Paul, Minn., after being misidentified as a robbery suspect. He was then shot and killed by an officer during the traffic stop. In this StoryCorps edition, Chad Eisen-Ramgren has a conversation with his 10-year-old daughter, who was a student at the school where Mr. Phil managed the cafeteria.

After serving a 19-year sentence, Jean Valjean ends up on the Lord Bishop's doorstep, where he is offered a warm meal and bed to sleep in. Although he steals from the bishop, in the end, he earns redemption and a second chance thanks to the bishop's wise and caring ways.

This story is the retelling of Robert Smalls' escape from slavery with his entire family in tow. With a plan "as dangerous as it was brilliant," Smalls commandeers a Confederate ship and successfully navigates it out of Charleston's blockaded port and into the hands of the Union army.

Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.

Two memorials have been built in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation-one in 1896 and 1998. And while they both pay tribute to the same event, they depict the African Americans within them in very different lights.

This story follows a girl who befriends the first African American to attend High Point Central High School, as a result of desegregation. What begins as an unintended and awkward experience in the cafeteria, becomes a strong and admirable friendship.

Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.

Regarded as one of the most important speeches in American history, it was delivered by Booker T. Washington as a plea for racial cooperation in the South during a time of deep racial prejudice.

In 1916, one family battled against the unjust laws aimed at immigrants of Japanese ancestry. In doing so, they lent their own voices to the growing chorus of Asian Americans insisting: "We belong here."