Books
Robin DiAngelo “White Fragility”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (“the most ruthlessly honest analyst of white innocence yet to pick up a pen. … His words drip with the searing eloquence of an evangelist of race determined to get to the brutal bottom of America’s original sin”)
Slavery:
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (“incisive history of slavery before cotton became king”)
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom (“explores the fate of enslaved women”)
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage (“probes the relationships between black and white women”)
Novels About Slavery:
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (“about a black family that owned enslaved blacks in the antebellum South”)
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (“about a newly freed slave who hops aboard a slave ship”)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (“probes the aftereffects of enslavement on the minds and souls of black folk”)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (“slim classic that brilliantly probes the white literary imagination and how it silences and distorts the dark agency from which it derives its meaning”)
Political Economy of Slavery:
“Slavery was ensconced in politics, intertwined with the economy, and thus you need to know”:
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet
Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told
Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden (“a haunting glimpse into what enslaved, and enslaving, people in the Atlantic world made of death”)
Civil War and Slavery:
Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering (“does for the Civil War what Brown does for slavery”)
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (shows that “The Civil War was, centrally, the infernal contest of white regions over black flesh and its future in America”)
Blacks During Reconstruction:
“Classics”:
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America
Eric Foner, Reconstruction
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (“ride the epic sweep of black migration … achingly brilliant”)
Civil Rights Movement:
Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement
Henry Hampton & Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom (based on documentary series, Eyes on the Prize)
Taylor Branch trilogy on MLK, Jr.: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, At Canaan’s Edge
Taylor Branch, America in the King Years
David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (“exhaustive and illuminating study of King”)
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home (“riveting account of the movement’s impact on white families in Birmingham, including her own”)
Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove (“shines a light on Jim Crow as the author probes the case of four young black men accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl in Florida and the valiant defense they got from future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall”)
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (“moving portrait of the great organizer and activist”)
Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine (“engrossing study of freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer”)
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle (“compelling study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee”)
Black Freedom Struggle:
Manning Marable, Malcolm X (“magnum opus”)
Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour (“invites us to understand the rich sweep of the black power movement”)
Peniel Joseph, Stokely
Joshua Bloom & Waldo Martin, Jr., Black against Empire (“a comprehensive study of the history and politics of the Black Panthers”)
Robin Kelley, Race Rebels (“The struggle of black working class folk is captured”)
Intersections of gender, class, sexuality, and feminist politics with race:
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Barbara Smith, The Truth That Never Hurts
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?
Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory
Kimberlé Crenshaw & Andrea Ritchie, Say Her Name
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought
The Classics
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (“groundbreaking essays that limn the color line at the turn of the twentieth century”)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (“wrestles with the perennial black problem of not being seen by the white world”)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (“her great novel rejecting racial uplift narratives”)
Essays of Alice Walker, along with her novel The Color Purple (“about the struggles of black women for room to breathe and love in the south in the 1930s”)
Black Autobiographies
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father
