Celebrating Black History Month is an important annual observance that takes place in February in the United States. This month-long celebration serves to recognize and honor the significant contributions, achievements, and history of Black individuals and communities throughout the years. It is a time dedicated to reflecting on the struggles and triumphs of Black people, acknowledging their profound impact on society, culture, politics, and various fields such as science, art, and education. The origins of Black History Month can be traced back to the early 20th century, when historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History established Negro History Week in 1926. This initiative aimed to promote the study and celebration of African American history, which had been largely overlooked and marginalized in mainstream narratives. The second week of February was chosen to coincide with the birthdays of two prominent figures in Black history: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Over the years, this week evolved into a month-long celebration, officially recognized as Black History Month in 1976.
During this month, a wide array of activities and events are organized across the nation, including educational programs, lectures, art exhibitions, and cultural performances. Schools, universities, and community organizations often engage in discussions, workshops, and presentations that highlight the achievements of Black leaders, artists, and thinkers, as well as the challenges they have faced throughout history. This educational aspect is crucial, as it fosters a deeper understanding of the systemic racism and social injustices that have affected Black communities and encourages dialogue about the ongoing struggle for equality and civil rights. Moreover, Black History Month serves as a reminder of the resilience and creativity of Black individuals who have shaped the cultural landscape of the nation. From the literary works of authors like Maya Angelou and James Baldwin to the groundbreaking scientific discoveries made by figures like George Washington Carver and Katherine Johnson, the contributions of Black individuals are vast and varied. Celebrating their achievements not only honors their legacy but also inspires current and future generations to strive for excellence and to continue the fight for justice and equality.
In addition to educational initiatives, Black History Month encourages individuals and organizations to engage in acts of solidarity and support for Black communities. This can include promoting Black-owned businesses, advocating for policies that address racial disparities, and participating in community service projects that uplift marginalized voices. By actively engaging in these efforts, individuals can contribute to a broader movement for social change and equity. In conclusion, celebrating Black History Month is a multifaceted endeavor that encompasses education, reflection, and action. It is an opportunity to honor the past, recognize the present, and inspire a future where the contributions of Black individuals are celebrated year-round. By acknowledging the depth and richness of Black history, we can work towards a more inclusive and equitable society that values the diverse narratives that shape our collective experience. This list includes books that are meant to honor, recognize, inspire, and create understanding.
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-Historical Classic-
Clotel: or, The President's Daughter by William W. Brown
Published: January 09, 2001
Description
The first novel published by an African American, Clotel takes up the story, in circulation at the time, that Thomas Jefferson fathered an illegitimate mulatto daughter who was sold into slavery. Powerfully reimagining this story, and weaving together a variety of contemporary source materials, Brown fills the novel with daring escapes and encounters, as well as searing depictions of the American slave trade. An innovative and challenging work of literary invention, Clotel is receiving much renewed attention today.
William Wells Brown, though born into slavery, escaped to become one of the most prominent reformers of the nineteenth century and one of the earliest historians of the black experience. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition reproduces the first, 1853, edition of Clotel and includes, as did that edition, his autobiographical narrative, "The Life and Escape of William Wells Brown," plus newly written notes.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Clotel: or, The President's Daughter, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/clotel-william-wells-brown/10523322?ean=9780679783237>.
-Literary Memoir-
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Published: April 21, 2009
Description
Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters.
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity."--James Baldwin
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings-maya-angelou/7694405?ean=9780812980028>.
-Historical Memoir-
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass, Ira Dworkin (Editor)
Published: January 28, 2014
Description
An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials
The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838, how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and driver, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man who could only live free or die. In addition to Douglass's classic autobiography, this new edition also includes his most famous speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" and his only known work of fiction, The Heroic Slave, which was written, in part, as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025,<https://bookshop.org/p/books/narrative-of-the-life-of-frederick-douglass-an-american-slave-frederick-douglass/7616841?ean=9780143107309>.
-Literary & Historical Coming of Age-
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Published: June 08, 2004
Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.
This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story" (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
"A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can't imagine American literature without it." --John Leonard, Los Angeles Times
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Beloved, Bookshop.org Website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/beloved-toni-morrison/285459?ean=9781400033416>.
-Historical African American-
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
Published: May 03, 2016
Description
Based off of the bestselling author's family history, this novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, who is sold into slavery in the United States where he and his descendants live through major historic events.
When Roots was first published forty years ago, the book electrified the nation: it received a Pulitzer Prize and was a #1 New York Times bestseller for 22 weeks. The celebrated miniseries that followed a year later was a coast-to-coast event-over 130 million Americans watched some or all of the broadcast. In the four decades since then, the story of the young African slave Kunta Kinte and his descendants has lost none of its power to enthrall and provoke.
Now, Roots once again bursts onto the national scene, and at a time when the race conversation has never been more charged. It is a book for the legions of earlier readers to revisit and for a new generation to discover.
To quote from the introduction by Michael Eric Dyson: "Alex Haley's Roots is unquestionably one of the nation's seminal texts. It affected events far beyond its pages and was a literary North Star.... Each generation must make up its own mind about how it will navigate the treacherous waters of our nation's racial sin. And each generation must overcome our social ills through greater knowledge and decisive action. Roots is a stirring reminder that we can achieve these goals only if we look history squarely in the face."
The star- studded cast in this new event series includes Academy Award-winners Forest Whitaker and Anna Paquin, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Derek Luke, Grammy Award-winner Tip "T.I." Harris, and Mekhi Phifer. Questlove of The Roots is the executive music producer for the miniseries's stirring soundtrack.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Bookshop.org website, Accessed on 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/roots-the-saga-of-an-american-family-alex-haley/15556584?ean=9780306824852>.
-Motivational, Inspirational, & Spirituality-
Faith in the Valley: Lessons for Women on the Journey to Peace by Iyanla Vanzant
Published: May 08, 1996
Description
Being in a valley can be a lonely and bewildering experience. This book was written to help you feel less lonely, by reminding you that you really aren't ever alone since God is always by your side, but more important, you are always by your own side. No matter how dire the situation may seem, no matter how dark and bleak the valley may be, you have all you need within you to survive the valley - any valley. Even though you may not know how you got into the valley in the first place, you do know, deep inside yourself, how to get through and out and free. You just need a little faith in yourself and a little guidance to find that faith within yourself.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Faith in the Valley: Lessons for Women on the Journey Toward Peace, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/faith-in-the-valley-lessons-for-women-on-the-journey-toward-peace-iyanla-vanzant/6701693?ean=9780684801131>.
-Historical & Religious-
The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale
Published: January 07, 2025
Description
A never before published novel from beloved author Zora Neale Hurston, revealing the historical Herod the Great--not the villain the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of valor and vision.
In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston's retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the "slaughter of the innocents," but a forerunner of Christ--a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.
From the peaks of triumph to the depths of human misery, the historical Herod "appears to have been singled out and especially endowed to attract the lightning of fate," Hurston writes. An intimate of both Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, the Judean king lived during the first century BCE, in a time of war and imperial expansion that was rife with political assassinations and bribery, as the old world gave way to the new.
Portraying Herod within this vivid and dynamic world of antiquity, little known to modern readers, Hurston's unfinished manuscript brings this complex, compelling, and misunderstood leader fully into focus. Hurston shared her findings about Herod's rise, his reign, and his waning days in letters to friends and associates. Text from three of these letters concludes the manuscript in an intimate way. Scholar-Editor Deborah Plant's "Commentary: A Story Finally Told" assesses Hurston's pioneering work and underscores Hurston's perspective that the first century BCE has much to teach us and that the lens through which to view this dramatic and stirring era is the life and times of Herod the Great.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Life of Herod the Great, Bookshop.org website Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-life-of-herod-the-great-zora-neale-hurston/21438428?ean=9780063161009>.
-Historical Classics-
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale
Published: January 01, 2006
Description
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/their-eyes-were-watching-god-zora-neale-hurston/18554113?ean=9780060838676>.
-Literary Coming of Age-
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Published: April 20, 2021
Description
A Best Book of the Year:
The Washington Post - Chicago Tribune - NPR - Vogue - Elle - Real Simple - InStyle - Good Housekeeping - Parade - Slate - Vox - Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal - BookPage
Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
A Reese's Book Club Pick
"The most provocative page-turner of the year." --Entertainment Weekly
"I urge you to read Such a Fun Age." --NPR
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Such a Fun Age, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/such-a-fun-age-kiley-reid/12084071?ean=9780525541912>.
-Literary LGBTQ+ Classics-
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Published: September 12, 2013
Description
One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this "truly extraordinary" novel (Chicago Sun-Times).
Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/go-tell-it-on-the-mountain-james-baldwin/15279977?ean=9780375701870>.
-Science Fiction Classics -
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Published: February 01, 2004
Description
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.")
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur "Genius" Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."
Dana's torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner's plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.
Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction's oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. "Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise" (New York Times).
"Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it's absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream."
--N. K. Jemisin
Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Kindred, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 13 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/kindred-octavia-e-butler/11629395?ean=9780807083697>.
-Science Fiction, Collections & Anthologies-
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler
Published: October 04, 2005
Description
A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability--and responsibility--to save humanity from itself?
Like all of Octavia Butler's best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature's strongest voices.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/bloodchild-and-other-stories-octavia-e-butler/577106?ean=9781583226988>.
-Political Classics-
Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
Published: May 18, 2021
Description
From the author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is a powerful and brilliantly crafted tale that explores themes of identity, race, and ambition.
"[A] stunning achievement. . . . Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time
The story follows Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator, whose life takes an unexpected turn when he calls for Alonzo Hickman, an old Black minister, to be by his side as he faces a mortal wound. As the two men intimately share their stories and memories, the true shape and substance of the past begin to emerge.
Here is Ellison, a virtuoso of American vernacular--the preacher's hyperbole and the politician's rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech--at the height of his powers, telling a moving, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century.
With an introduction and additional notes by John F. Callahan, who first compiled Juneteenth out of thousands of manuscript pages in 1999, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson.
"Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Juneteenth, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 11 January 2025,<https://bookshop.org/p/books/juneteenth-revised-ralph-ellison/16234226?ean=9780593314616>.
-Classics-
Invisible man by Ralph Ellison
Published: March 14, 1995
Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," before retreating amid violence and confusion.
Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Invisible Man, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/invisible-man-ralph-ellison/6697209?ean=9780679732761>.
-Literary Coming of Age-
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Published: February 01, 2022
Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES - THE WASHINGTON POST - NPR - PEOPLE - TIME MAGAZINE - VANITY FAIR - GLAMOUR
New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST
"Bennett's tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it's especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye." --Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal
"A story of absolute, universal timelessness . . . For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be...." - Entertainment Weekly
From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Vanishing Half, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 11 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-vanishing-half-brit-bennett/14931102?ean=9780525536963>.
-Historical Classics-
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Published: December 10, 2019
Description
Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.
Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, The Color Purple writes a message of healing, forgiveness, self-discovery, and sisterhood to a new generation of readers. An inspiration to authors who continue to give voice to the multidimensionality of Black women's stories, including Tayari Jones, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Jesmyn Ward, and more, The Color Purple remains an essential read in conversation with storytellers today.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women--their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.
Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, The Color Purple breaks the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, and carries readers on an epic and spirit-affirming journey toward transformation, redemption, and love.
"Reading The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women's literature as world literature. In writing us into the world--bravely, unapologetically, and honestly--Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay." --Tayari Jones
"The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art." --Kiese Laymon
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Color Purple, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-color-purple-alice-walker/285324?ean=9780143135692>.
-Literary Classics-
Native Son by Richard Wright
Published: January 10, 2023
Description
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels
"If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son." - Henry Louis Gates Jr.
"The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath." --The New Yorker
When it was first published in 1940, Native Son established Richard Wright as a literary star. In the decades since, Wright's masterpiece--hailed by Newsweek as "a novel of tremendous power and beauty"--has become a revered classic that remains as timely and relevant today as when it first appeared.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man caught in a downward spiral after killing a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Written with the distinctive rhythm of a modern crime story, this formidable work is both a condemnation of social injustice and an unsparing portrait of the Black experience in America, revealing the tragic effect of poverty, racism, and hopelessness on the human spirit. "I wrote Native Son to show what manner of men and women our 'society of the majority' breeds, and my aim was to depict a character in terms of thw living tissue and texture of daily consciousness," Wright explained.
This edition of Native Son--the restored text established by the Library of America--is the novel as Wright intended it to be published. It also includes an essay by Wright titled, How "Bigger" was Born, along with notes on the text.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Native Son, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/native-son-richard-wright/8842828?ean=9780060837563>.
-Poetry-
My People by Langston Hughes (Author), Charles R. Smith Jr. (Illustrator)
Expected Release: February 18, 2025
Description
This Coretta Scott King Award-winning photography book based on Langston Hughes's classic poem is perfect for kids and moving and powerful for readers of all ages.
Langston Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribute to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Charles R. Smith Jr. interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, My People, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-people-langston-hughes/11585699?ean=9781416935407>.
-Historical Classics-
Dark Princess by W. E. B. Du Bois
Published: May 15, 2024
Description
Disillusioned with the United States after being expelled from medical school because of his race, Matthew Towns, a young African American man, moves to Berlin, Germany, where he meets and falls in love with Kautilya, a princess from India. They become members of an international coalition against white imperialism.
Civil rights activist and NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois dedicated his life to illuminating racial bigotry's historical, economic, and cultural consequences. Dark Princess, written in the genre of fantasy romance fiction, offered Du Bois an opportunity to fulfill his greatest ambitions, dreams, and longings: eradicating prejudice and discrimination against African Americans and people of color. Although it was not well received when it was first published, the novel is a powerful indictment of white supremacy -- and a stirring call for international solidarity among people of color. It has since been rediscovered by scholars and critics who appreciate its bold vision and historical significance.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Dark Princess, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/dark-princess-a-romance-w-e-b-du-bois/20942995?ean=9780486852591>.
-Black Studies, Inspirational & Motivational-
The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois
Published: November 12, 2019
Description
"EITHER AMERICA WILL DESTROY IGNORANCE OR IGNORANCE WILL DESTROY THE UNITED STATES." -W.E.B. Du Bois
This classic groundbreaking work of American literature first published in 1903 is a cornerstone of African-American literary history and a seminal work in the field of sociology.
W.E.B. Du Bois, who drew from his own experiences as an African-American living in American society, explores the concept of "double-consciousness"-a term he uses to describe living as an African-American and having a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others."
With Du Bois' examination of Black life in post-Civil War America, his explanation of the meaning of emancipation and its effect, and his views on the roles of the black leaders of his time, The Souls of Black Folk is one of the important early works in the field of sociology. His fourteen essays have had a lasting impact on civil rights and the discussion of race in the United States. The essays include these topics:
"OUR" SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS
THE DAWN OF FREEDOM
MEANING OF PROGRESS
TRAINING OF BLACK MEN
THE SONS OF MASTER AND MAN
FAITH OF THE FATHERS
SORROW SONGS
AND MORE
WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DU BOIS (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, (where he was the first African-American to earn a doctorate), he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the NAACP.
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, The Souls of Black Folks, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-souls-of-black-folk-original-classic-edition-w-e-b-du-bois/14233929?ean=9781722502904>.
-African American Studies, Memoir-
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Published: July 01, 2000
Description
One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in America
A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseduonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in the seven years she spent hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic, Jacobs skillfully used the literary genres of her time, presenting a thoroughly feminist narrative that portrays the evils and traumas of slavery, particularly for women and children.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators
Source Citation:
Bookshop.org 2025, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 14 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/incidents-in-the-life-of-a-slave-girl-written-by-herself-harriet-jacobs/14938461?ean=9780140437959>.
-Literary Classics-
The Street by Ann Petry
Published: January 07, 2020
Description
With a new introduction from New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork.
The Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s.
Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis in her pursuit of the American dream for herself and her son, Bub. Lutie fully subscribes to the belief that if she follows the adages of Benjamin Franklin by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent.
The first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies, its haunting tale still resonates today.
"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose."--Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review
Bookshop.org 2025, The Street, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-street-ann-petry/15286418?ean=9780358187547>.
-Historical Biography-
Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Ann Petry
Published: January 02, 2018
Description
This quintessential middle grade biography of Harriet Tubman now features a cover by NAACP Image Award winner and Caldecott Honor illustrator Kadir Nelson, a foreword by National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds, and additional new material. A selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List.
Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad was praised by the New Yorker as "an evocative portrait," and by the Chicago Tribune as "superb." It is a gripping and accessible portrait of the heroic woman who guided more than 300 enslaved people to freedom.
Harriet Tubman was born in slavery and dreamed of being free. She was willing to risk everything--including her own life--to see that dream come true. After her daring escape, Harriet became a conductor on the secret Underground Railroad, helping others make the dangerous journey to freedom.
This award-winning introduction to the late abolitionist, which was named an ALA Notable Book and a New York Times Outstanding Book, includes additional educational back matter such as a timeline, discussion questions, and extension activities.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/harriet-tubman-conductor-on-the-underground-railroad-ann-petry/7325433?ean=9780062668264>.
-Historical Fantasy-
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published: November 17, 2020
Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK - From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.
"This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."--San Francisco Chronicle
IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE - Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films
NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD - NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time - NPR - The Washington Post - Chicago Tribune - Vanity Fair - Esquire - Good Housekeeping - Paste - Town & Country - The New York Public Library - Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children--the violent and capricious separation of families--and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Praise for The Water Dancer
"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations--and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy."--Rolling Stone
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, The Water Dancer, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-water-dancer-ta-nehisi-coates/11376808?ean=9780399590610>.
-Memoir-
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published: July 14, 2015
Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE - PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST - ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" - NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
Hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race" (Rolling Stone)
NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY - NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN - NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New York, Newsday, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly
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. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Between the World and Me, Bookshop.org, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/between-the-world-and-me-ta-nehisi-coates/7372138?ean=9780812993547>.
-Superheros-
Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Book 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published: August 30, 2016
Description
A new era begins for the Black Panther! MacArthur Genius and National Book Award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) takes the helm, confronting T'Challa with a dramatic upheaval in Wakanda that will make leading the African nation tougher than ever before. When a superhuman terrorist group calling itself The People sparks a violent uprising, the land famed for its incredible technology and proud warrior traditions will be thrown into turmoil. As suicide bombers terrorize the population, T'Challa struggles to unite his citizens, and a familiar villain steps out of the shadows. If Wakanda is to survive, it must adapt - but can its monarch, one in a long line of Black Panthers, survive the necessary change? Heavy lies the head that wears the cowl! Collecting BLACK PANTHER (2016) #1-4 and FANTASTIC FOUR (1961) #52, plus more than 25 pages of bonus content!
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Black Panther: A Nation under Our Feet Book 1, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/black-panther-book-1-a-nation-under-our-feet-ta-nehisi-coates/11485865?ean=9781302900533>.
-Jazz, Blues, African American Studies-
Blues People by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
Published: January 20, 1999
Description
"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." -- Langston Hughes
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music--through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America--not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Blues People, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/blues-people-leroi-jones/7214022?ean=9780688184742>.
-Essays, LGBT Studies, Feminism, Social Class & Economic Disparity-
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Published: August 01, 2007
Description
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature.
"[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware."--The New York Times
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. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.
These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Booksop.org websites, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/sister-outsider-essays-and-speeches-audre-lorde/16589268?ean=9781580911863>.
-Women's Mystery Thriller-
My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Published: July 30, 2019
Description
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME - BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE - "A taut and darkly funny contemporary noir that moves at lightning speed, it's the wittiest and most fun murder party you've ever been invited to." --MARIE CLAIRE
Korede's sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola's knife.
Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her "missing" boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.
Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she's exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she's willing to go to protect her.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, My Sister, the Serial Killer, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-sister-the-serial-killer-oyinkan-braithwaite/7365513?ean=9780525564201>.
-Historical Literary-
The Wedding by Dorothy West
Published: January 01, 1996
Description
In her first novel in forty-seven years, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into the African American upper middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, "The Wedding" tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.
Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society, " we witness the prominent Coles family as they gather for the wedding of their loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.
With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, The Wedding, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-wedding-dorothy-west/16987668?ean=9780385471442>.
-Love, Romance, Cultural Studies-
All About Love by Bell Hooks
Published: January 30, 2018
Description
A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Lovereveals 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 bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.
As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, All About Love, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025,<https://bookshop.org/p/books/all-about-love-new-visions-bell-hooks/8888106?ean=9780060959470>.
-Civil Rights, African American Studies-
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King Jr.
Published: January 01, 2010
Description
MLK's classic account of the first successful large-scale act of nonviolent resistance in America: the Montgomery bus boycott.
A young Dr. King wrote Stride Toward Freedom just 2 years after the successful completion of the boycott. In his memoir about the event, he tells the stories that informed his radical political thinking before, during, and after the boycott--from first witnessing economic injustice as a teenager and watching his parents experience discrimination to his decision to begin working with the NAACP. Throughout, he demonstrates how activism and leadership can come from any experience at any age.
Comprehensive and intimate, Stride Toward Freedom emphasizes the collective nature of the movement and includes King's experiences learning from other activists working on the boycott, including Mrs. Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin. It traces the phenomenal journey of a community and shows how the 28-year-old Dr. King, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transform the nation and the world.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/stride-toward-freedom-the-montgomery-story-martin-luther-king/8988834?ean=9780807000694>.
-Social History, Civil & Human Rights-
Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by Brandy Colbert
Published: October 04, 2022
Description
A searing new work of nonfiction from award-winning author Brandy Colbert about the history and legacy of one of the most deadly and destructive acts of racial violence in American history: the Tulsa Race Massacre. Winner, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award.
In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives.
In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass? What exactly happened? And why are the events unknown to so many of us today?
These are the questions that award-winning author Brandy Colbert seeks to answer in this unflinching nonfiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In examining the tension that was brought to a boil by many factors--white resentment of Black economic and political advancement, the resurgence of white supremacist groups, the tone and perspective of the media, and more--a portrait is drawn of an event singular in its devastation, but not in its kind. It is part of a legacy of white violence that can be traced from our country's earliest days through Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement in the mid-twentieth century, and the fight for justice and accountability Black Americans still face today.
The Tulsa Race Massacre has long failed to fit into the story Americans like to tell themselves about the history of their country. This book, ambitious and intimate in turn, explores the ways in which the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre is the story of America--and by showing us who we are, points to a way forward.
YALSA Honor Award for Excellence in Nonfiction
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025,<https://bookshop.org/p/books/black-birds-in-the-sky-the-story-and-legacy-of-the-1921-tulsa-race-massacre-brandy-colbert/18256966?ean=9780063056671>.
-Historical Autobiography-
Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges
Published: September 01, 1999
Description
In November 1960, all of America watched as a tiny six-year-old black girl, surrounded by federal marshals, walked through a mob of screaming segregationists and into her school. An icon of the civil rights movement, Ruby Bridges chronicles each dramatic step of this pivotal event in history through her own words.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Through My Eyes, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/through-my-eyes-ruby-bridges/12096082?ean=9780590189231>.
-Women's Autobiography-
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
Published: October 11, 2016
Description
Jacqueline Woodson's National Book Award and Newbery Honor winner is a powerful memoir that tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.
A President Obama "O" Book Club pick
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
Includes 7 additional poems, including "Brown Girl Dreaming."
Praise for Jacqueline Woodson:
"Ms. Woodson writes with a sure understanding of the thoughts of young people, offering a poetic, eloquent narrative that is not simply a story . . . but a mature exploration of grown-up issues and self-discovery."--The New York Times Book Review
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Brown Girl Dreaming, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/brown-girl-dreaming-jacqueline-woodson/6668286?ean=9780147515827>.
-Historical Literary-
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Published: May 02, 2017
Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE - WINNER OF THE PEN / HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION -
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
One of Oprah's Best Books of the Year, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed--and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Homegoing, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/homegoing-yaa-gyasi/16339347?ean=9781101971062>.
-Social, Prejudice & Racism-
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Published: May 03, 2022
Description
8 starred reviews - Goodreads Choice Awards Best of the Best - William C. Morris Award Winner - National Book Award Longlist - Printz Honor Book - Coretta Scott King Honor Book - #1 New York Times Bestseller!
"Absolutely riveting!" --Jason Reynolds
"Stunning." --John Green
"This story is necessary. This story is important." --Kirkus (starred review)
"Heartbreakingly topical." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A marvel of verisimilitude." --Booklist (starred review)
"A powerful, in-your-face novel." --Horn Book (starred review)
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
But what Starr does--or does not--say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
Want more of Garden Heights? Catch Maverick and Seven's story in Concrete Rose, Angie Thomas's powerful prequel to The Hate U Give.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, The Hate U Give, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025,<https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-hate-u-give-angie-thomas/17739550?ean=9780062498540>.
-Historical Classics-
Cane by Jean Toomer
Expected Release: June 13, 2011
Description
First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work--part drama, part poetry, part fiction--powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Cane, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/cane-jean-toomer/52743?ean=9780871402103>.
-Literary Science Fiction-
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Published: October 03, 2017
Description
--One of Esquire magazine's 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
"Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine . . . Stunning." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, An Unkindness of Ghosts, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/an-unkindness-of-ghosts-rivers-solomon/7214631?ean=9781617755880>.
-Literary, Political, World Literature-
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Published: September 01, 1994
Description
"A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world." --Barack Obama
"African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe." --Toni Morrison
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS'sThe Great American Read
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s,Things Fall Apartexplores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages,Things Fall Apartprovides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Things Fall Apart, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/things-fall-apart-chinua-achebe/6698050?ean=9780385474542>.
-Women, Family, LGBT-
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Published: November 05, 2019
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
"A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood . . . An impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves . . . Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum." --Booker Prize Judges
Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language. Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women that paints a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and looks back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.
Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Girl, Woman, Other, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/girl-woman-other-bernardine-evaristo/18279672?ean=9780802156983>.
-African American Studies, Black Studies (Global)-
How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith
Published: December 27, 2022
Description
This "important and timely" (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Timesbestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America--and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.
A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.
Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Stowe Prize
Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism
A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-the-word-is-passed-a-reckoning-with-the-history-of-slavery-across-america-clint-smith/15485196?ean=9780316492928>.
-African American Studies, Discrimination & Race Relations-
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Published: January 07, 2020
Description
One of the New York Times's Best Books of the 21st Century
Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot'and Zora
A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author
"It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." --Adam Shatz, London Review of Books
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S."
Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-new-jim-crow-mass-incarceration-in-the-age-of-colorblindness-anniversary-michelle-alexander/594237?ean=9781620971932>.
-Mystery Women Sleuths-
Windy City Dying by Eleanor Taylor Bland
Published: November 01, 2003
Description
Marti MacAlister, Eleanor Taylor Bland's popular African-American heroine, is forced to confront some extremely personal demons from long ago-her husband Johnny MacAlister is long-buried, but now someone from Johnny's past is back, looking for him, and Marti fears she knows who it might be.
In the meantime, her work as a suburban Chicago homicide detective has taken her back in time in another way, to a group of children she once counseled, each now four years older and with four more year's worth of problems. There's LaShawna, now seventeen and with her own four-year-old daughter; Padgett, all grown up at twelve but still living with his alcoholic mother; and then Jose, fifteen, who's in the most trouble of them all. He's been accused of murder, but the Jose that Marti remembers could not have committed such a terrible crime. Her first step is to find out what could have happened in the past four years to lead Jose to such a desperate act, and she hopes her second step will be to prove his innocence.
It won't be easy, though; just what's going on with this tight group of kids, and how does it relate to the increasingly foreboding sense of doom Marti gets about the mystery man who's nosing around the remnants of her distant past? She's not sure, but she knows she must figure it all out, and soon, before another of the children, or even Marti herself, falls into grave danger.Windy City Dying is another taut, absorbing read from one of the masters of mystery fiction.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Windy City Dying, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/windy-city-dying-eleanor-taylor-bland/12261108?ean=9780312320485>.
-Mystery & Detective-
Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors by Eleanor Taylor Bland
Published: January 04, 2005
Description
A dazzling collection of crime and mystery stories by Black authors.
Bringing together today's brightest talent from the field--from Walter Mosley, "one of America's best mystery writers" (The New York Times), to the late Hugh Holton, whose "gift for retaining suspense is golden" (Chicago Sun-Times)--it is the first anthology of African-American mystery writers. Shades of Black is not only a tribute to the art of storytelling, it's a fascinating foray into the rich and widely varied Black experience.
Includes stories by:
Frankie Y. Bailey - Jacqueline Turner Banks - Chris Benson - Eleanor Taylor Bland and Anthony Bland - Patricia E. Canterbury - Christopher Chambers - Tracy Clark - Evelyn Coleman - Grace F. Edwards - Robert Greer - Terris MacMahan Grimes - Gar Anthony Haywood - Hugh Holton - Geri Spencer Hunter - Dicey Scroggins Jackson - Glenville Lovell - Lee E. Meadows - Penny Mickelbury - Walter Mosley - Percy Spurlark Parker - Gary Phillips - Charles Shipps
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/shades-of-black-crime-and-mystery-stories-by-african-american-authors-eleanor-taylor-bland/21144195?ean=9780425200148>.
-Essays, American- African American-
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudine Rankine
Published: October 07, 2014
Description
Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Winner of the NAACP Image Award
Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize
Winner of the PEN Open Book Award
*ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Citizen: An American Lyric, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/citizen-an-american-lyric-claudia-rankine/16664249?ean=9781555976903>.
-Literary Cultural Heritage-
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Published: April 17, 2012
Description
From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home--a home that is silent and suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father's authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins' laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.
Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Purple Hibiscus, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/purple-hibiscus-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/229084?ean=9781616202415>.
-Literary Cultural Heritage Classics-
Petals of Blood by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Published: February 22, 2005
Description
"The definitive African book of the twentieth century" (Moses Isegawa, from the Introduction) by the Nobel Prize-nominated Kenyan writer
The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign-owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time.
First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.
Source Citation
Bookshop.org 2025, Petals of Blood, Bookshop.org website, Accessed 15 January 2025, <https://bookshop.org/p/books/petals-of-blood-ngugi-wa-thiong-o/11696253?ean=9780143039174>.
While this is not a fully exhaustive list of Black authors that can and should be celebrated, I believe that it covers a good jumping-off point for anyone looking to uncover voices that need, want, and should be heard. The literary contributions of Black authors span a vast array of genres, themes, and styles, each offering unique perspectives and insights into the complexities of the Black experience. From the poignant narratives of historical struggles to contemporary explorations of identity and culture, these authors provide a rich tapestry of storytelling that resonates deeply with readers from all walks of life. Black History Month serves as a vital opportunity for individuals to learn, acknowledge, and grow—not only in America but across the globe. It encourages a collective reflection on the contributions and experiences of Black individuals throughout history, fostering a deeper understanding of the systemic challenges they have faced and continue to confront. This month is not just a time for remembrance, but also a call to action, urging everyone to engage with the literature and art that reflect the richness of Black culture and history.
Engaging with the works of Black authors allows readers to step into different realities, broadening their horizons and challenging preconceived notions. This exploration can spark important conversations about race, equity, and social justice, making it essential for educational institutions, book clubs, and individuals to prioritize these voices. By amplifying Black authors, we not only honor their contributions but also enrich our own perspectives, fostering empathy and understanding in an increasingly interconnected world. As we delve into the works of these authors, we uncover stories that are often overlooked or marginalized, giving rise to a more inclusive literary canon. By celebrating Black achievements and recognizing the significance of their narratives, we contribute to a more equitable representation in literature and society at large. Thus, Black History Month is an invitation for everyone to engage with these vital voices, ensuring they are heard and appreciated not just during this designated time, but throughout the year.
Have you read any of the books within this list? Drop a comment, a rating, and let me know your thoughts. Thanks for reading! If you're interested in purchasing any of these books for yourself, feel free to check out the link below.
Disclosure: This is an affiliate link, meaning I may earn a small commission if you purchase through it. Clicking the link will bring you to my bookshop on Bookshop.org where you can see all the books listed here available for purchase.
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