Book List - Black History

Updated July 2024.

Showing 61 - 80 of 88  There are a total of 173 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Becoming"
Description:
In her memoir Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. She describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms....
Book cover for "Freedom is a constant struggle"
Description:
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the...
Book cover for "Angela Davis"
Description:
The two women wait for the darkest part of night. Only then will they feel safe enough to leave the little house in Echo Park. Outside there may be men with guns or warrants--or both. When the dark is at its deepest, the two women step outside. One of them is Angela Davis. With this scene, a most remarkable woman opens her story. From a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century,...

64. Kindred

Book cover for "Kindred"
Description:
"The visionary author's masterpiece pulls us-along with her Black female hero-through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now"--
Book cover for "The origin of others"
Description:
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...
Book cover for "Song of Solomon"
Description:
"Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world."--
Book cover for "All about love"
Description:
The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy, this book reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes...
Book cover for "The color purple"
Description:
The lives of two sisters -- Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child wife living in the South -- are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
Book cover for "The Gift of Black Folk"
Description:
A look at African Americans' contributions to the United States by the iconic leader whose life spanned from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and a co-founder of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois remains a towering figure in US history. In The Gift of Black Folk, he celebrates Black Americans' struggle for equality - a battle that would continue long after slavery was abolished and in...
Book cover for "The souls of black folk"
Description:
A collection of 14 essays which records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of Black America, and explores the paradoxical "double consciousness" of African-American life. W.E.B. Du Bois was the foremost black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. Here, Du Bois records the...
Book cover for "The book of delights"
Description:
In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of...
Book cover for "We were eight years in power"
Description:
“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man...
Book cover for "The warmth of other suns"
Description:
Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. With stunning historical...
Book cover for "The underground railroad"
Description:
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...
Book cover for "The tradition"
Description:
"Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown;s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which weve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems...
Book cover for "Their eyes were watching God"
Description:
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....
Book cover for "The street"
Description:
"The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies"--
Book cover for "Stamped from the beginning"
Description:
"Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course...
Book cover for "So you want to talk about race"
Author:
Description:
Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So...
Book cover for "Roots"
Author:
Description:
This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the seventeen-year-old Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from his home in Gambia and transported as a slave to colonial America. In this account Haley provides an imaginative...