One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

It is 1968, and three black sisters from Brooklyn have been put on a plane by their father to spend a month with their mother, a poet who ran off years before and is living in Oakland, California. It's the summer after Black Panther founder Huey Newton was jailed and member Bobby Hutton was gunned down trying to surrender to the Oakland police, and there are men in berets shouting "Black Power" on the news. Delphine, 11, remembers her mother, but has heard her grandmother say that her mother is a selfish, crazy woman who sleeps on the street. She and her sisters have a summer like one they never expected.