BOOK ll Book Description: Live or Die Tryin’: An Un-American Dream(by Arthur Perrie Daniell Gibson) Born into poverty in the forgotten town of Brooklyn, Illinois, Author Perrie Daniell Gibson was a child with dreams far bigger than his surroundings. But by the time he was six years old, his life would take a turn that far too many Black children in America know all too well.
After moving to a predominantly white town in Illinois, Gibson found himself a stranger in a hostile land — the only Black child in his fourth-grade class, misdiagnosed, mislabeled, and sentenced to special education through a system designed to break spirits rather than build them. Though he loved learning, he was cast aside, passed along, and trapped in a pipeline that led not to college but to a cage.

At just fourteen, Gibson became the target of racial violence, surviving a near lynching at the hands of a white mob in Granite City. Days later, he was wrongfully arrested, kidnapped by the system, and hurled into the juvenile detention machine — a child tried as an adult, sentenced at fifteen years old to sixteen years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

Live or Die Tryin’: An Un-American Dream is a raw, heart-wrenching memoir about survival against a system built to silence, miseducate, and erase.
It is a testament to the human spirit’s refusal to die trying — a voice for every child failed by the school-to-prison pipeline, for every family shattered by poverty, racism, and injustice.

Through the pain, through the betrayal, through the loss — Author Perrie Daniell Gibson stands tall to remind the world:
The American Dream was never ours. But the will to live, learn, and rise again will always be.