Our Black Books Matter reading list features an authentic and unapologetically Black perspective. During today’s challenging times of the health pandemic and the recent mass protests and demonstrations against this country’s long history of police brutality and institutional racism, there have been an outpouring of emotions, from anger to grief, all galvanizing calls for political change. Literature as a reflection of society is a forceful tool.
Since 2002, the mission of Center for Black Literature has been-and continues still-to expand, broaden, and enrich the public’s knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the value of Black literature. In keeping with its mission, the staff at CBL began compiling a reading list of titles that we and our colleagues turn to for fortitude, inspiration, and uplift. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, and an honoree of CBL’s 16th National Black Writers Conference, stated: “I think all great literature helps us understand what happens between the two momentous breaths we have. You have two momentous breaths, the first one and the last one. What happens in between?
In 2025, a quarter of the way into this pivotal century and nearly 100 years since the iconic Harlem Renaissance - an era that profoundly shaped Black artistic expression and cultural identity - this project feels especially urgent. Whether those sentiments are unfortunate misperceptions or turn out to very legitimate based on very real actions, we felt the need to do our part to ensure that the legacy of Black influence on global culture never fades.
For this issue of the SAVE THE CULTURE series, we reached out to Dr. Tony Medina, director of the Howard creative writing program, to compile a list of 20 essential works of Black literature. Given the innumerable works to choose from, he instead wrote 21, (and of course we needed to add a couple of our own honorable mentions). Spanning from before the civil war to today and from novels to poetry to plays to critiques, these works are only a few examples of how monumental African American writers have been, from giving voice to the enslaved and oppressed to radically shifting all of literature and inspiring new ways of approaching what it means to be Black.
PLEASE NOTE: The Center’s listing only scratches the surface of an ever-growing literary landscape of Black writers; thus, we invite recommendations from our colleagues, friends, and supporters.
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Essential Works of African American Literature
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass: This slim narrative depicts the origin stories of the heroic freedom fighter Frederick Douglass, who helped shaped American society. Two things standout for me: How Frederick Douglass tricked a couple of white boys on the plantation he was enslaved on to teach him to read and the horrible depiction of his grandmother who was promised her freedom repeatedly yet denied until she was too old to enjoy it.
- Iola LeRoy by Frances E. W. Harper (1892): This important novel is narrated by a Black woman whose father was a slaveholder and is eventually set free by a Union army commander in the Civil War.
- Cane by Jean Toomer: Quiet as it has been kept, Cane is a modernist, experimental novel that is frequently overshadowed by white American and European literary modernists. It stands as a major achievement in American literature in general and African American literature in particular, representing a hybrid text (incorporating poetry, prose, and drama) decades before the recent appropriation of the term hybrid.
- Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier: In this seminal text, E. Franklin Frazier (B.A. 1916) provides a historical analysis of the class forces in Black America deriving from enslavement. This important historical analysis posits that the Black intellectual is caught up in an existential quagmire, knowing intellectually what the major problem of Black people in America is but is unable to solve it because that would mean certain critical revolutionary measures must be achieved.
- Fire!! edited by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, et al.: This communally self-published, literary and arts journal, only published once, announced the major voices and concerns of the writers of the New Negro Movement (known as the Harlem Renaissance). The name, according to co-founder Langston Hughes, was “to burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past ... into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists and provide us with an outlet for publication not available in the limited pages of the small Negro magazines then existing.” With pieces focusing on homosexuality, bisexuality, prostitution, and colorism, it managed to rustle the feathers of its main patrons: the Black bourgeoisie who were concerned with respectability politics rather the independent free thinking of young Black artists. Even W.E.B. DuBois had a problem with the likes of Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman, et al.
- The Souls of Black Folk: Introduction by John Edgar Wideman by W. E. B. Du Bois
- The New Negro: An Interpretation edited by Alain Locke: Featuring poems, essays, and fiction from many of the authors featured in this list, including Hurston, Hughes, and Toomer, "The New Negro: An Interpretation" was regarded as the definitive collection of the Harlem Renaissance, while Locke's titular essay laid a vision of a new Black identity unburdened by stereotypes or shame; one defined by a deep self-understanding, fearless self-expression, and celebration of African art. Drawing criticism from intellectuals including W.E.B. Du Bois and Harold Cruce, the work continues to be debated today. Locke was a pivotal figure within Howard. Beginning as an associate professor in 1912, he would go on to serve as the chair of the university's Department of Philosophy from 1921 to 1953. During his tenure, he was known as the "Dean of the Harlem Renaissance," shaping African American literary, art, and cultural criticism and analysis for decades.
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston: This groundbreaking work of fiction depicts a Black love story like no other.
- Black Fire edited by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neale (1968): This major American anthology was a major advancement in Black literature because it represents the works of writers emerging post-Harlem Renaissance, with some distinct ideas regarding Black art production and a break from white patronage for Black institution building.
- The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes: These two seminal works mark the work of Langston Hughes, one of the first American poets to successfully integrate the blues musical form into poetry. Langston’s poetry speak to the concerns of Black people historically in a wide range of aesthetic turns, while the stories of Jess B. Semple portray an everyman figure in Black literature able to successfully satirize the major social, political, and historical zeitgeist of the times, which still resonates today. “The Best of Simple” is available from Macmillan publishers.
- Sula by Toni Morrison: Even in her debut novel, Morrison showed an unparalleled ability to, in heartbreaking, poetic detail, shine a light on the complex ways Black people, especially Black women and girls, endure trauma at a societal and personal level. Through the slow psychological break of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, brought on by sexual and physical abuse, poverty, neglect, and deep internalized racism, Morrison delivers an unflinching account of the relentless combined damage racism, colorism, class, and sexism inflict, and of how these layered abuses lead to a denial of humanity, both externally and internally. It is difficult to overstate Morrison's legacy as a writer and thinker. Author of many of the most influential works in African American literary history, including "Sula," "Song of Soloman," and "Beloved," she graduated from Howard in 1953 and went on to teach at the university for seven years.
- Kindred by Octavia Butler: Kindred provides a rich, science fictional narrative of a Black woman pulled back into the past of her enslaved ancestor through time travel and pain.
- Reflex & Bone Structure by Clarence Major (1996): Another Black experimental narrative that stretches the imagination and reality itself. Major takes cinematic, jazz improvisational, surrealistic narrative leaps to examine a love triangle interrupted by a death or murder.
- Does Your House Have Lions? The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown by Sterling A. Brown
- The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde: In this book of essays you get a powerful cross section of Audre Lorde’s political and philosophical belief system as she defines and redefines herself as a Black Woman Lesbian Warrior, prefiguring Third Wave feminism and the Womanist movements in America.
- for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange: This literary piece, consisting of poetry structured into a theater piece, was groundbreaking in form as well as content. Centering the struggles of Black women, this is a performance piece that has inspired generations of poets, playwrights, and students alike.
- Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur: Through a prose narrative garnished with poems, we get the life story of the revolutionary Assata Shakur, who escaped from prison to Cuba following a shootout with New Jersey police.
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X: In this classic work of creative nonfiction, we get the narrative of the life of a heroic figure such as Malcolm X (El Haj Malik El Shabazz), alongside the historical sweep of the Black struggle and its myriads of political veins in America, showing not only the struggle of Black people in America but its constant reconciliation with varying ideas toward freedom, post chattel slavery.
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow provides an important interrogation of the prison industrial complex disproportionately warehousing Black and Brown people into increasingly privatized prisons, creating a new, shadow slavocracy. The book rejects the notion that the systemic racism of Jim Crow was ended by the civil rights movement, proposing that mass incarceration and the war on drugs have changed the language used to justify oppression.
- Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed: In this experimental novel, Ishmael Reed explores through satire and fragmented narratives the major forces plaguing the Black community by attempting to ban and abolish its culture which primarily derives from African and African American traditions and folklore.
- Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
- Furious Flower anthologies (1999, 2004, 2020): These anthologies, produced by the Furious Flower Poetry Center, named after a metaphor from Gwendolyn Brooks, encompass three to four generations of Black poetry predating the Black Arts Movement to the present. Housed at James Madison University, since the 90s the center has been a vital space for cultivating and preserving Black poetry.
In Praise of Toni Morrison's Enduring Legacy
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