Book List - Black History

Updated July 2024.

Showing 1 - 20 of 62  There are a total of 173 valid entries on the list.

1. Binti

Book cover for "Binti"
Series:
Binti volume 1.
Description:
Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs. Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter...
Book cover for "Parable of the sower"
Series:
Parable books volume 1.
Description:
"In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages." --
Book cover for "The best that you can do"
Description:
"Primarily told from the perspective of women and children in the Northeast who are tethered to fathers and families in Puerto Rico, these stories explore the cultural confusion of being one person in two places - of having a mother who wants your father and his language to stay on his island but sends you there because you need to know your family. Loudly and joyfully filled with Cousins, Aunts, Grandparents, and budding romances, these stories...
Book cover for "Those who saw the sun"
Description:
"The past is not past. We may think something ancient history, or something that doesn’t affect our present day, but we would be wrong. Those Who Saw the Sun is a collection of oral histories told by Black people who grew up in the South during the time of Jim Crow. Jaha Nailah Avery is a lawyer, scholar, and reporter whose family has roots in North Carolina stretching back over 300 years. These interviews have been a personal passion project for...
Book cover for "The bodies keep coming"
Description:
As a Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, Williams tried to save the lives of police officers shot in Dallas in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation that loves feel-good stories about heroism...
Book cover for "American founders"
Description:
American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality...
Book cover for "Witness"
Description:
"An elegant, stirring, insistent new book bearing out actions taken and not taken, from the acclaimed National Book Award finalist"--
Book cover for "The mis-education of the Negro"
Description:
"The most influential work by "the father of Black history," reflecting the long-standing tradition of anti-racist teaching pioneered by African-American educators. The Mis-education of the Negro (1933) is Woodson’s most popular classic work of Black social criticism. As both student and teacher, Woodson witnessed distortions of Black life in the history and literature taught in schools and universities. He identified a relationship between these...
Book cover for "No better time"
Description:
In early 1945, Dorothy and 800 African American WACs arrive at their post in England where they are tasked with processing mail sent to GIs from their loved ones back home, an estimated 17 million pieces, and with their outlooks changed forever, return to the U.S. as the catalysts for change in America.
Book cover for "The American queen"
Description:
"There is only one known queen who ruled a kingdom on American soil. This is her story"--
Book cover for "Come and get it"
Author:
Description:
"It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue"--
Book cover for "The queen of Sugar Hill"
Description:
"It was supposed to be the highlight of her career, the pinnacle for which she'd worked all her life. And as Hattie McDaniel took the stage in 1940 to claim an honor that would make her the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award, she tearfully took her place in history. Between personal triumphs and tragedies, heartbreaking losses, and severe setbacks, this historic night of winning best supporting actress for her role as the sassy Mammy...
Book cover for "Dazzling"
Description:
Treasure and her mother lost everything when Treasure's father died. Haggling for scraps in the market, Treasure meets a man who promises to change their fortunes, but his feet are hovering just a few inches above the ground. He's a spirit, and he promises to bring Treasure's beloved father back to life if she'll do one terrible thing for him first.Ozoemena has an itch in the middle of her back. It's an itch that speaks to her patrilineal destiny,...
Book cover for "Everything is not enough"
Description:
"Can a career woman truly have it all? Powerful marketing executive Kemi Adeyemi has finally found the man she needs, but Tobias Wikstr©œm thinks she's the most selfish woman he has ever met for asking him to give up his life in Sweden and move to the US for her own comfort. Will Kemi be forced to stay if she wants to keep him while chipping away at her hard-earned career? As things begin to sour and challenge her relationship with Tobias, someone...
Book cover for "Touched"
Description:
"Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And he is the Cure. Martin begins slipping into an alternate consciousness, with new physical strengths, to violently defend his family--the only Black family in their neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles--against pure evil."--
Book cover for "The list"
Description:
In this debut novel, "a high-profile female journalist's world is upended when her fiancé's name turns up in a viral social media post"--
Book cover for "Symbols of freedom"
Description:
In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner” waving over “the...
Book cover for "Reclamation"
Description:
A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings' family explores America's racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors-both the enslaver and the enslaved. Gayle Jessup White had long heard the stories passed down from her father's family, that they were direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson—lore she firmly believed, though others did not. For four decades the acclaimed journalist and genealogy enthusiast researched her connection...
Book cover for "Black birds in the sky"
Description:
"In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial...
Book cover for "Making all Black lives matter"
Description:
"In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social-media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. To many, especially those in the media, Black Lives Matter appeared to burst onto the national political landscape out of thin air. But as Barbara Ransby shows in Making All Black Lives Matter, the movement...