Non Fiction 
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There are a total of 173 valid entries on the list.
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For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear ... In [this book], Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth...
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"The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas, the first principals in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who traveled the world as highly celebrated stars in their field and whose legacy was erased from history until now. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarça was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company--the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She was the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance...
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"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...
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An award-winning broadcaster and educator presents his experiences following the path of African Americans who traveled the country during the age of segregation using The Green Book, a guide which helped Black people travel safely. He journeys from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. He gathers memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the...
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A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.
The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America's legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn't join in. For...
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"The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been...
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"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...
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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...
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In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. This book touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt...
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"Using history as a foundation, The Humanity Archive uses storytelling techniques to make history come alive and uncover the truth behind America's whitewashed history. Challenging dominant perspectives, author Jermaine Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories. Connecting current issues with the heroic struggles of those who have come before us, Fowler brings hidden history to light." --
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There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years--from...
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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...
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"In 1920, as art and writing flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois published The Brownies' Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun-the first periodical for African American youth, collecting original art, stories, letters, and activities to celebrate their identities and inspire their imaginations and ambitions. Building upon Du Bois's mission, esteemed professor and scholar Karida Brown and celebrated artist Charly Palmer...
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"An award-winning author charts the poignant journeys of African Americans abroad as she explores her own transatlantic family odyssey in this powerful global history of traveling while Black. Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Tying these tales together is Dr. Tamara J. Walker's personal...
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"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...
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"In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. That community,...
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In this unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer, the author shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law. During her lifetime and after her death, Billie Holiday was often...
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"A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars-members of the Reparations Planning Committee-who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward. The first section of The Black Reparations...
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Journalist David Montero follows the trail of the massive wealth amassed from the transatlantic slave trade by Northern corporations in America. It has long been maintainedby many that the North wasn't complicit in the horrors of slavery, that the forced bondage and exploitation of Black people was primarily a Southern phenomenon. Yet this isn't true: In fact, popular Northern banks - including well-known institutions like Citibank, Bank of New York,...
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"Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. In 'From Here to Equality, ' William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and...