Book List - Black History

An interior design book featuring the stunning homes of those who have made significant contributions to Black American culture-from chef Alexander Smalls to Don Cheadle and Bridgid Coulter to Danielle Brooks, this interior design book steps into the intimate spaces of actors and musicians, creative rooms of artists and curators, generational homes with history, and "boss" offices of entrepreneurs and executives. Throughout, you'll find historical...

"It's 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. She falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup's status quo and could lead to the young couple's expulsion-or worse-from the home they hold dear. But as Raymond...

"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...

Saddled with personal troubles, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. In Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed...

Known for her prodigious musical talent, her timeless blues narratives about personal and socioeconomic problems, her tough persona, and her innate ability to enrapture audiences with her raw voice, Bessie Smith--the Empress of the Blues--receives a unique biographical treatment in this special life narrative captured by one of Scotland's finest poets. By masterfully blending research, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and her own experiences in listening...

In late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the...

Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was. Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King's revolutionary...

A collection of sermons by the African-American civil rights leader explains his convictions in terms of the conditions and problems of contemporary society.

A Northwestern University clinical psychologist challenges common cultural misconceptions to reveal the real-world systemic abuse, health traumas, and abandonment that disempower today's Black women and force them to hide behind masks of strength.

Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.