A BLACK HISTORY MONTH READING LIST

You know the basics.  MLK.  Rosa.  Harriett.  Maybe even Sojourner.  But Black History Month provides the incentive to go beyond the icons.  Here are seven books for a deeper understanding. (Click on title to buy a copy.)

The King Years, by Taylor Branch — You could plow through Branch’s three-volume King bio or you can read this short but powerful collection of excerpts that cover every major event in The Movement.

Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston — The novelist’s memoir tells her remarkable story of growing up in an all-black Florida town, then facing down the world beyond it with spirit and humor.  

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Himself — As powerful as ever.  Douglass gives the full story of his own enslavement, escape, and eyewitness to the horrors of slavery.  If you haven’t read it, you don’t know the full American story.

The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter — Don’t let the title fool you.  The Princeton historian sees black history through the eyes of racism running thick throughout human history.  Raw, unapologetic racism was more than slavery, more than Jim Crow, more than the South.

The Warmth of Other Suns : The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson — The black migration out of the South changed America. Wilkerson follows three migrants north, then compares the migration to other human migrations throughout history. An epic story, ten years researched, that won about every award a book can win.

A Short History of Reconstruction, by Eric Foner — Forget the myth.  Here’s the truth about how the Civil War spurned a noble effort to help freed slaves, only to see vigilante violence “redeem” the white South.

Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine — Bringing black history into its painful present, Rankine blends poetry, storytelling, video scripts and tragic news into an unforgettable indictment of contemporary racism.  An uncomfortable book, as it should be, Citizen won about every literary award you can win, plus a MacArthur Genius Grant for Rankine.