Book List - Black History

Updated July 2024.

Showing 21 - 40 of 62  There are a total of 173 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Speak no evil"
Description:
"On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, DC, he's a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school, bound for Harvard in the fall. But Niru has a painful secret: he is gay- an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except Meredith, his best friend, the daughter of prominent Washington insiders- and the one person who seems not to judge him. When Niru's...
Book cover for "Florynce "Flo" Kennedy"
Description:
Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy (1916–2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie M. Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist. Rather than simply reacting to the predominantly white feminist movement, Kennedy brought the lessons...
Book cover for "Your Black Friend and Other Strangers"
Description:
In Your Black Friend and Other Strangers, Ben Passmore masterfully tackles comics about race, gentrification, the prison system, online dating, gross punks, bad street art, kung fu movie references, beating up God, and lots of other grown-up stuff with refreshing doses of humor and lived relatability. The title comic earned Passmore a much deserved Eisner nomination, Ignatz Award for "Outstanding Comic", and a coveted spot on NPR's 100 Favorite Graphic...

24. Monster

Book cover for "Monster"
Description:
While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.
Book cover for "Black history in its own words"
Description:
Black History In Its Own Words started in January 2015 when Matt Bors asked me to find eight quotes and illustrate them for The Nib for February, Black History Month. I chose quotes ranging from the casual to the profound from luminaries both past and present. I had so much fun that I did four extra. The next year, 2016, I drafted 12 more; I had a habit. Presented here are the original 24 as well as 15 new ones for 2017.
Book cover for "Chasing me to my grave"
Description:
A self-taught artist's odyssey from Jim Crow era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery-a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. Winfred Rembert grew up as a field hand on a Georgia plantation. He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh start...
Book cover for "On Juneteenth"
Description:
Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas-in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown-to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger...
Book cover for "The conjure-man dies"
Description:
An African king with a degree from Harvard who set himself up as a "conjure-man", a fortune teller, is murdered in 1930s Harlem. This is the first known mystery novel written by an African American. Also includes the short story "John Archer's Nose."

29. Passing

Book cover for "Passing"
Description:
Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. Fair, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family's happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they...
Book cover for "Barracoon"
Description:
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...
Book cover for "James Baldwin's Another country"
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Description:
"Set mainly in Greenwich Village and Harlem, James Baldwin's 1962 novel, Another Country, is a groundbreaking work of sexual, racial and artistic passions that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality. In her volume, award winning author and essayist Kim McLarin shares her appreciation of this seminal novel, demonstrating how its myriad themes-- including relations between men and women (gay and straight, Black and white), the...
Book cover for "The selected works of Audre Lorde"
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"A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. Her incisive essays and passionate poetry-alive with sensuality, vulnerability, and rage-remain indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical...
Book cover for "Power to the People"
Description:
This pictorial history tells the story of the revolutionary Black Panther Party in the words of its co-founder, Bobby Seale. Coming toward the end of America's epic Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party was one of the most creative and influential responses to racism and inequality in American history. They advocated armed self-defense to counter police brutality, and initiated a program of patrolling the police with shotguns-and law...
Book cover for "The Brother You Choose"
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In 1971, Eddie Conway, Lieutenant of Security for the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to life plus thirty years behind bars. Paul Coates was a community worker at the time and didn't know Eddie well, the little he knew, he didn't much like. But Paul was dead certain that Eddie's charges were bogus. He vowed never to leave Eddie, and in so doing, changed the course of both their...
Book cover for "Black Detroit"
Description:
The author of Baldwin’s Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit—a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city’s past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation’s fabric. -- Publisher
Book cover for "Felon"
Description:
Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems-canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace-and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout...
Book cover for "Citizen"
Description:
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media.
Book cover for "Thick"
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A collection of essays from the author of Lower Ed sheds light on the trait of being "thick," both in form and in substance, while dissecting society and culture from beauty to Obama to pumpkin-spice lattes.
Book cover for "Lighting the fires of freedom"
Description:
In Lighting the Fires of Freedom Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on womens all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for...
Book cover for "The yellow house"
Description:
This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the...