This is by no means intended to be a comprehensive Black History Month reading list, as there are far too many significant books and writers for one list.
Nikole Hannah-Jones - Reframing the Legacy of Slavery with “The 1619 Project” | The Daily Show
Understanding the Foundations
The 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones won a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize for her work on The 1619 Project, which “reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.
This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today.
We were honored when Hannah-Jones joined us at the opening reception for Dark Testament in September 2022 and delivered remarks after exploring the just-opened exhibit.
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois was the father of American sociology and one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century.
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His classic text, The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903.
Black Reconstruction in America came thirty years later.
One, it sets the stage for the field of reconstruction studies.
Prior to its publication, the failure of post-Civil War reconstruction was cast as the inevitable result of the inadequacy of black people.
Du Bois’s diligent scholarship and his political, economic and social analyses proved that image was wrong.
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He showed that freed people, together with Radical Republicans, created transformative political solutions to post-Civil War problems.
He showed the promise of reconstruction ended ingloriously because government abandoned the cause of freed people.
It’s a dense book, but it’s filled with compelling narratives and analyses of the motivations, frustrations and aspirations of participants in the process of Reconstruction.
He explores why disaffection exists between poor and working-class white Americans, how race is deployed to destroy the potential for class solidarity and the stark reality of antebellum black life in the South.
It was a groundbreaking text, which remains widely influential to this day.
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So Du Bois fused “scholarship and struggle . . . social analysis and social transformation,” as Brandon Byrd pointed out in an essay for the African American Intellectual History Society, citing the words of Manning Marable.
Du Bois was not just a scholar, he was also amongst the most important political organizers of black Americans.
He was one of the founders of the NAACP.
All of his intellectual commitments, as writer, scholar, mentor and organizer, were geared towards addressing these problems.
Biographies and Autobiographies
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells by Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling.
Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans.
This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells’s private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.
This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
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.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
In June 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd and other brutalities perpetuated by police, we organized a reading of this memoir to remind us of the depth of the pain and cruelty upon which our country was built, and how far we have yet to go to meet the true hope of equality that Douglass spent his life fighting and writing for.
Exploring Key Themes and Movements
Exodus: Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth Century Black America by Eddie Glaude
Glaude is a groundbreaking scholar who writes beautifully.
Exodus is an incredibly sophisticated, highly readable work.
It’s a nice entry point to early nineteenth-century black life in the United States.
Exodus was widely acclaimed when first published in both literary circles and among academics, and by historians and those who study religion.
Glaude provides us a narrative of the earliest stages of black freed people as they are imagining their political future.
He does that through the document trail of the period’s intellectuals and the institutional documents of black religious organization.
So, it’s an intellectual history, a political history and a religious history, beautifully written and filled with engaging figures from this period.
Glaude highlights the early nineteenth-century roots of black nationalism.
It’s important not to see black nationalism as a late civil rights movement reaction.
Often, black nationalism is imagined as emerging in the late 1960s.
But in the early nineteenth century, with the exception of Haiti, black people were not citizens anywhere.
Enslaved people are not citizens; colonized people are not citizens.
So, in the early nineteenth century there was a fervor for creating a state that black people could be a part of-not just in America but in many parts of the world.
By reading Glaude, we can apprehend that black nationalism is a recurring current that flows throughout the history of black politics, black religious life, and the entire course of US history.
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin Kelly
The history of the black left is often a missing piece in the histories of how the civil rights movement grew.
This is a foundational text for understanding the deep roots of the black left in the deep South, the lingering plantation economy and early southern industry.
Many of the figures that Kelly treats in the book were early twentieth-century organizers who became mentors and teachers of civil rights leaders.
Kelly shows the activists at work generations before the 1960s Civil Rights Revolution.
It’s an adept Marxian analysis of Alabama, and an economic and sociopolitical analysis of the region that is at the core of black life in the United States.
Even though it’s no longer the case that the majority of black Americans live in the Deep South, that is where most of the roots of black life lie.
Its stories are wonderful.
Kelly drew from archives to deliver a strong sense of what black life was like in agricultural Alabama.
It’s both a beautiful book and an instructive one.
