Books
Other Book Lists
Anti-Racism Starter List
A People's History of the United States
I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Me and White Supremacy
So You Want to Talk About Race
Howard Zinn, 1980
Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered. Frequent appearances in popular media such as The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Good Will Hunting, and the History Channel documentary The People Speak testify to Zinn’s ability to bridge the generation gap with enduring insights into the birth, development, and destiny of the nation.
Austin Channing Brown, 2018
In a time when nearly every institution (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claims to value diversity in its mission statement, Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice. Her stories bear witness to the complexity of America’s social fabric—from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.
Layla F Saad, 2020
Based on the viral Instagram challenge that captivated participants worldwide, Me and White Supremacy takes readers on a 28-day journey, complete with journal prompts, to do the necessary and vital work that can ultimately lead to improving race relations.
Ijeoma Oluo, 2018
Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi, 2020
The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.
Ibram X Kendi, 2016
Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.
Robin Diangelo, 2018
Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Anti-Racism Intermediate List
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland
How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
How to be an AntiRacist
Ronald Takaki, 1993
Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounted the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States--Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others--groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture.
Jonathan Metzl, 2019
In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death.
Heather Cox Richardson, 2020
How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government.
Ibram X Kendi, 2019
Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.
The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Anders Walker, 2018
In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston found pluralism in Jim Crow, a legal system that created two worlds, each with its own institutions, traditions, even cultures.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, 2018
Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.
Michelle Alexander, 2010
With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.
Anti-Racist Specific Topics
Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
Darryl Pinkney, 2014
A meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, Pinckney investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns.
Matthew Desmond, 2016
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems.
James W. Loewen, 1995
After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, Loewen has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.
Marc Lamont Hill, 2016
In this analysis of state-sanctioned violence, Marc Lamont Hill carefully considers a string of high-profile deaths in America—Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others—and incidents of gross negligence by government, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. He digs underneath these events to uncover patterns and policies of authority that allow some citizens become disempowered, disenfranchised, poor, uneducated, exploited, vulnerable, and disposable.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria
Richard Rothstein, 2017
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
Berver Doniel Tatum, PhD, 2017
Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides.
Autobiographies, Biographies, Memoirs, & Personal Narratives
A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota
Becoming
Between the World and Me
Born A Crime
Edited by Sun Yung Shin, 2016
In this provocative book, sixteen of Minnesota's best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in Minnesota. They give readers a splendid gift: the gift of touching another human being's inner reality, behind masks and veils and politeness. They bring us generously into experiences that we must understand if we are to come together in real relationships.
Michelle Obama, 2018
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, 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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis.
Trevor Noah, 2016
Noah’s book reads like an episode of his late night show which is to say it’s informative, compelling, and well researched. This is a must read for those looking to understand race and class.
Free Cyntoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Prison System
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
Men We Reaped
Cyntoia Brown-Long, 2019
Everyone from Rihanna to Kim Kardashian was tweeting about Cyntoia Brown-Long, the young woman incarcerated for defending herself against her abuser and a sexual predator. Cyntoia’s story is one that many women share—and this book sheds light on how systems set up to protect us, fail us time and time again.
Bryan Stevenson, 2014
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
Paul Butler, 2009
This Harvard Law grad turned prosecutor went from high-powered attorney to wrongfully accused Black man in one day. What that experience taught him is cemented through this book and will tell you all you need to know about this rigged system.
Jesmyn Ward, 2013
America often equates Black to mean urban America when more of us live in “middle America” and the deep South than anywhere else. Ward is a literary artist who spins the stories of Black men in Mississippi with so much love and a deep desire to protect those she loves.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir
Untamed
Malcolm x and Alex Haley, 1965
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.
James McBride, 1995
Interspersed throughout his mother's compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.
Rosemary L Bray, 1998
Racism feels like this big scary monster which can make some of us feel like we don’t know where to begin in dismantling it and others feel it’s not relevant to them at all. Bray sets the record straight with these vignettes and anecdotes about what racism looks like in practice but also how police interventions can work to alleviate the pressures.
Glennon Doyle, 2020
In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, and bestselling author explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.
When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
Patrisse Khan Cullors, 2018
Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter over five years ago alongside two other Black women organizers. Years later, she reflected on her own journey to that moment and what it means to be labeled a terrorist by the government that has sought to erase you and those you love.
Black Feminism
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Assata: An Autobiography
Bad Feminist
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
bell hooks, 1981
Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions.
Assata Shakur, 1987
On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper.
Roxane Gay, 2014
Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.
Patricia Hill Collins, 1990
Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music and oral history, the result is a superbly crafted and revolutionary book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Brittney Cooper, 2018
So what if it’s true that Black women are mad as hell? They have the right to be. In the Black feminist tradition of Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper reminds us that anger is a powerful source of energy that can give us the strength to keep on fighting.
Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, 2012
“Listen to Black women!” Want to learn what Black women from movements past have to say about justice and freedom? Look no further than this foundational manifesto.
Alice Walker, 1983
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter’s healing words.
Audre Lorde, 1984
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.
To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe
Women, Race, & Class
Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande, 2019
This book brings together activists, artists, and scholars of color to show how Black feminism and Afrofeminism are being practiced in Europe today, exploring their differing social positions in various countries, and exploring the ways in which they organize and mobilize to imagine a Black feminist Europe.
Angela Y Davis, 1981
A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.
Black LGBTQ+
Black Like Me
Black On Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Giovanni's Room
No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America
John Howard Griffin, 1961
In the Deep South of the 1950’s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
C. Riley Snorton, 2017
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects.
James Baldwin, 1956
This novel focuses on the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men in his life, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar.
Darnell L. Moore, 2018
When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies
Real Life: A Novel
Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist
Since I Laid My Burden Down
E. Patrick Johnson, 2016
The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study.
Brandon Taylor, 2020
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood.
Eli Saslow, 2018
Rising Out of Hatred tells the story of how white-supremacist ideas migrated from the far-right fringe to the White House through the intensely personal saga of one man who eventually disavowed everything he was taught to believe, at tremendous personal cost. With great empathy and narrative verve, Eli Saslow asks what Derek's story can tell us about America's increasingly divided nature. This is a book to help us understand the American moment and to help us better understand one another.
Brontez Purnell, 2017
DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?
The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir
The Summer We Got Free: A Novel
Unapologetic A black, queer, and feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography
Staceyann Chin, 2009
No one knew Staceyann’s mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother’s house in Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann’s mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive. It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica.
Mia McKenzie, 2012
At one time a wild young girl and a brilliant artist, Ava Delaney changes dramatically after a violent event that rocks her entire family. Once loved and respected in their community and in their church, they are ostracized by their neighbors, led by their church leader, and a seventeen-year feud between the Delaneys and the church ensues.
Charlene A Carruthers, 2018
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist.
Audre Lorde, 1982
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is an autobiography by American poet Audre Lorde. It started a new genre that the author calls biomythography, which combines history, biography, and myth.
Other Non-Fiction
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970
Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
Dorothy Roberts, 2011
This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of biological concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.
Angela Y Davis, 2016
Renowned civil rights activist Angela Davis’ latest book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, dissects the legacies of past resistance movements and reflects on how they can inform our current efforts. Though heavy with research and statistics, the book clocks in under 200 pages, making it a reasonable jumping off point for understanding the intricacies of systemic racism and how far it reaches. Whether you’re a seasoned protester or just joining our ranks, Davis breaks down how you can assist movements on an individual level.
Lynn Olsen, 2001
One of the primary criticisms of the Civil Rights movement has been its lack of recognition towards the women who helped make their progress possible. Despite their integral place in launching movements like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, women were rarely given the stage to speak their truth. In Lynne Olson’s “Freedom’s Daughters” she tells the stories of women that history often overlooks, dating pre-Civil War to 1970.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2017
In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.
killing rage: Ending Racism
Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
bell hooks, 1995
These twenty-three essays are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. They address a spectrum of topics having to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; and internalized racism in movies and the media.
Ruth King, 2018
"Racism is a heart disease," writes Ruth King, "and it's curable." Exploring a crucial topic seldom addressed in meditation instruction, this revered teacher takes to her pen to shine a compassionate, provocative, and practical light into a deeply neglected and world-changing domain profoundly relevant to all of us.
Resmaa Menakem, 2017
In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies.
Monique Morris, 2015
Black girls and women are often left out of the conversation when it comes to criminal justice reform but Morris reiterates exactly how Black girls are oversexualized, more likely to be described as aggressive, and more frequently suspended or expelled, leading to this school-to-prison pipeline we hear so much about.
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
The Fire Next Time
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
The Myth Of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
Michael Eric Dyson, 2017
A provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.
James Baldwin, 1963
At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Edited by Jesmyn Ward, 2016
Inspired by James Baldwin’s seminal book The Fire Next Time, National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward shows a new generation how true his words still ring more than 50 years later with her collection of essays and poems, The Fire This Time. The text is split into three parts that tackle our history, current predicament and hopes for the future, with contributions from social critics like Keise Laymon, Isabel Wilkerson and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah.
Robert Sussman, 2014
Biological races do not exist―and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today.
The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Grace Lee Boggs, 2011
In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities.
Isabel Wilkerson, 2010
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author 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.
Novels
Americanah
An American By Marriage
Children of Blood and Bone
The Bluest Eye
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013
The story of two Nigerians making their way in the U.S. and the UK, raising universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for identity and a home.
Tayari Jones, 2018
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined.
Tomi Adeyemi, 2018
Science fiction is a powerful tool for exploring problems from the distance we normally aren’t afforded with day-to-day life. This first part of the electric new trilogy explores issues of fear, revenge, and what it takes to build a new future.
Toni Morrison, 1970
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.