A Black Lives Matter Reading List

... Read American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight ...”] Summary

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A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid is a work of creative nonfiction originally published in 1988. Kincaid shares memories of her home country, Antigua, both while it was under colonial rule and self-governance. She illustrates how life has and hasn’t changed for Antiguan citizens because of government corruption, the legacies of slavery, and the preoccupation with tourism over public welfare. Though the book won no awards, Kincaid has won a plethora of awards for her... Read A Small Place Summary

Originally written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) is the transcribed posthumous autobiography of the life of Oluale “Cudjo Lewis” Kossola (1841-1935), written by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Known for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was a writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and filmmaker. In all her work, she held a special appreciation for Black life and Black culture of the US South. Her works... Read Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Summary

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction book Between the World and Me was published in 2015 by One World, an imprint of Random House. It was met with critical acclaim and won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Biography/Autobiography genre, and the 2016 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. It is a New York Times best-seller and was heralded by iconic literary figure Toni... Read Between the World and Me Summary

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a 2020 historical and narrative nonfiction work about the nature of inequality in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Wilkerson is a writer and former journalist, best known for her work in the New York Times, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize. She achieved further acclaim with her 2010 work, The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson has also taught journalism at many colleges and... Read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Summary

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America. Published in 2014, Citizen combines prose, poetry, and images to paint a provocative portrait of the African American experience and racism in the so-called “post-racial” United States. Claudia Rankine is an essayist, poet, playwright and the editor of several anthologies; she is currently the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Citizen is the winner of... Read Citizen: An American Lyric Summary

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“Ego Tripping,” also known as “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why),” is one of American poet Nikki Giovanni’s most well-known poems. Giovanni first published this poem in 1972, which is the year that also marks Giovanni’s first trip to Africa, three years after the birth of her son. As the title of the poem suggests, this poem is a fulsome celebration of the many facets of Giovanni’s identity as a Black woman. Written... Read Ego Tripping Summary

Nigerian author Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief is a work of autofiction originally published in Nigeria in 2007 and published in the US in 2014. The novel unfolds in picaresque style from the first-person perspective, as a narrator who closely resembles the author returns to Nigeria after 15 years in the US to reckon with Nigerian national identity and his own legacy. Surprised to find that he feels less comfortable in his... Read Every Day Is for the Thief Summary

Fire from the Rock is a 2007 novel by American author Sharon Draper. The book was named a 2008 Notable Social Studies Committee Trade Book for Young People and was among the 2008 New York Public Library Best Books for the Teen Age. Fire from the Rock is a work of historical fiction that follows 15-year-old Sylvia Patterson as she and her family navigate the tension in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the months leading up... Read Fire from the Rock Summary

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How to Be an Antiracist is a nonfiction book by Ibram X. Kendi, a writer and historian of African American History and the founder of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Published in 2019, this New York Times best seller proposes antiracist strategies individuals can employ to transform racist policies. This study guide refers to the Kindle edition of the book.How to Be an Antiracist sets out to define antiracist work as a set of... Read How to Be an Antiracist Summary

I’m Still Here is a nonfiction memoir published in 2018 by the American author Austin Channing Brown. Subtitled Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, the book chronicles Brown’s lifelong efforts to navigate White spaces as a Black Christian woman. Amid a surge of interest in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests, actress Reese Witherspoon selected I’m Still Here for her popular Hello Sunshine book club.This study guide refers to the 2018... Read I'm Still Here Summary

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Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (2020) is a work of apocalyptic fiction that examines the relationship between race and class during an unspecified disaster that cuts off all communication, forcing two families together. The book uses omniscient narration and interpersonal conflict to heighten the fear of disconnection in the Information Age, treating the apocalypse as an event that happens on a human scale. Published to great acclaim, it has been longlisted for the National... Read Leave the World Behind Summary

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Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad is a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book and workbook published in 2020. Structured around a 28-day antiracism journaling challenge, white readers and participants critically examine their own personal complicity in upholding white supremacy.Stemming from author Saad’s viral challenge on Instagram— #MeAndWhiteSupremacy—over the course of four weeks, Me and White Supremacy breaks open white supremacy as an... Read Me and White Supremacy Summary

More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City is a 2009 nonfiction book by William Julius Wilson, a Harvard University professor of sociology. In his book, Wilson examines the structural and, more controversially, the cultural contributors to the poverty, high incarceration rate, and social problems faced by inner-city African American males today. Wilson’s central contention is that African Americans have suffered disproportionately from the impacts of nonracial political and global economic... Read More Than Just Race Summary

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Notes of a Native Son is a collection of nonfiction essays by James Baldwin. Baldwin originally published the essays individually in various literary and cultural commentary magazines between 1948 and 1955. The Beacon Press first republished the essays as Notes of a Native Son in 1955. This study guide refers to the 2012 Beacon Press edition of Notes of a Native Son. Citations to page numbers, however, come from the volume The Price of the... Read Notes of a Native Son Summary

One Person, No Vote by writer and professor Carol Anderson is a current affairs book and finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. It was originally published in 2018; in 2019, Anderson added an Afterword to the paperback edition and released a young adult version. One Person, No Vote documents how Republican-led state governments exploit a weakened Voting Rights Act to tilt elections in their favor.Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016... Read One Person, No Vote Summary

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Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, published in 2019, is a Speculative Fiction/Fantasy novel intended for Young Adult readers. Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time, Pet was also a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The novel received the Stonewall Book Award, which recognizes achievement in LGBTQIA+ literature. Emezi, a non-binary Nigerian Igbo and Tamil writer who uses they/them pronouns, is also the author of two novels... Read Pet Summary

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“Slave on the Block” is a short story by Langston Hughes that originally appeared in the September 1933 issue of Scribner's Magazine. The story was later published in The Ways of White Folks, a 1934 collection of Hughes’s short stories.This study guide, based on the 1990 Vintage Classics print edition, quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.Anne and Michael Carraway are affluent white bohemians who live in Greenwich Village—and often visit Harlem—during the... Read Slave on the Block Summary

Solitary (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2019) is a memoir by the activist Albert Woodfox that recounts more than four decades in solitary confinement, largely at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It was nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Woodfox describes how the poverty and racism he endured growing up led him into crime, how the racism of individuals and institutions turned his initial... Read Solitary Summary

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a 2015 nonfiction book by Kristen Green about the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964, following the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional. During the five years the public schools were closed, black students in Prince Edward County largely went uneducated while a new private school for whites, Prince Edward Academy, opened. The book... Read Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County Summary

So You Want to Talk About Race is a 2018 non-fiction book written by Ijeoma Oluo, an American author of Nigerian descent whose columns and news articles on race have appeared in The Guardian, The Stranger, and Jezebel, among other places. This guide refers to the first edition published in 2018 by Seal Press. The title gestures to the discourse that is necessary to combat racial oppression in the United States. The book made Bustle’s... Read So You Want to Talk About Race Summary

“Spunk” is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston published in 1925. Set in the rural Southern United States, “Spunk” follows the conflict that ensues when one man pursues another man’s wife. The story’s publication helped establish Hurston as a significant literary voice during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1989, George C. Wolfe adapted the story, along with content from two others by Hurston, into a play by the same name. Citations in this guide correspond... Read Spunk Summary

Ibrahim Kendi’s comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016. Organized around the lifespans of five of the most influential or representative individuals in racial thought across American history, the text spans centuries, offering an overview of the enduring and evolving forms of racist ideology in America.Kendi’s book incorporates conversations in science, literature, visual and musical arts, politics, and... Read Stamped From the Beginning Summary

Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (2020) is a nonfiction book by the American authors Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. It is a self-described “remix” of Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award winner Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. An award-winning writer of young adult fiction and poetry, Reynolds frames America’s history of racist ideas for an audience of middle school and high school readers. Reynolds’s remix... Read Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You Summary

The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, originally published in 2003 by Oxford University Press, is a popular history book by American cultural historian Jim Cullen. As an overview and critical analysis of the American Dream, this book adds some meat to the bones of a traditionally ambiguous concept. Cullen maintains an optimistic outlook about the usefulness of the various American Dreams and about the promise of America, despite... Read The American Dream Summary

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, published the essay “The Case for Reparations” in that magazine’s June 2014 issue. It was widely acclaimed and, according to the Washington Post, set a record at the time for the most-viewed article in a single day on The Atlantic website. The essay earned Coates a George Polk Award for commentary in 2014.In the essay, Coates examines the idea of the United States government paying reparations to... Read The Case for Reparations Summary

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) comprises two autobiographical essays in which the author confronts the racial issues and tensions that he believes corrupt and deform American life and the American dream. Baldwin’s essays exemplify and precursor many of the elements and arguments central to the Civil Rights movement. Please note: Throughout the text, Baldwin uses the racial labels/language common at the time he was writing. This study guide, which uses the Vintage Reissue... Read The Fire Next Time Summary

The Fire This Time is a contemporary anthology responding to America’s turbulent racial climate. Jesmyn Ward, associate professor of English at Tulane University, edited the anthology. She has won numerous awards for her fiction writing, and in this book she seeks to present a collection of writing poetry from varied voices to illustrate the current moment and imagine a possible future. The book, which contains 14 essays and four poems, was published in 2016. In her... Read The Fire This Time Summary

Carter Godwin Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro is a social critique that addresses the inherent structural and institutional racism represented by the United States education system. Originally written and published in 1933, this study guide refers to a republication of the text from 2010 by IAP (Las Vegas, Nevada). The book traces Woodson’s arguments regarding how the United States education system reproduces White supremacy and fails to educate Black students; this failure, Woodson contends... Read The Mis-Education of the Negro Summary

In Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the writer presents his argument regarding the creative limitations Black Americans face. Initially published in 1926, the essay traces a short, powerful argument that relies both on Hughes’s own identity as an artist as well as his critical observations of US society. As a Black author writing in the early 20th century, Hughes uses the terms “Negro” and “black” interchangeably; this study guide exclusively uses... Read The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain Summary

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a nonfiction book published in 2010 by American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander. The book argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration operate as tools of racialized social control and oppression, not unlike the system in place during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, The New Jim Crow continues... Read The New Jim Crow Summary

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Published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is an important contribution to African-American literature, American literature, and sociology. A collection of 14 essays, the work is Du Bois’s description of the state of the South and African Americans’ lives at the turn of the 20th century. This guide is based on the Amazon Classics Kindle book edition.In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois describes the psychological struggles of African Americans as... Read The Souls of Black Folk Summary

... Read The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Summary

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“The Undefeated” (2019) is a free verse children’s poem by poet and novelist Kwame Alexander. The poem, published as a picture book, celebrates Black Americans, highlighting the struggles the Black community has endured and overcome throughout America’s history, with particular attention on great figures from history, including artists, athletes, and civil rights activists. While the poem’s target audience is children, Alexander and the book’s illustrator, Kadir Nelson, address serious topics like slavery and police brutality... Read The Undefeated Summary

... Read This Is the Fire Summary

Through My Eyes is the autobiography of Ruby Bridges. In 1960, Bridges became the first African American child to integrate an elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana following a court mandate for the state to desegregate its public school system. Louisiana trailed segregation effort in neighboring states, such as the nine Black high school students known as the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.Bridges’s autobiography, published in... Read Through My Eyes Summary

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... Read We Want to Do More Than Survive Summary

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy is a collection of essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a regular contributor to The Atlantic and a commentator on matters of race, Black identity, and White supremacy. Published in 2017, the collection focuses on what accounts for America’s inability to escape its White supremacist past, the impact of the Obama presidency on American culture and the writer, and the enduring impact of slavery on the country; the... Read We Were Eight Years in Power Summary

When They Call You a Terrorist is a nonfiction memoir published in 2018 by the American authors and activists Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. Subtitled A Black Lives Matter Memoir, the book chronicles Cullors’s early life in Los Angeles and her role in cofounding Black Lives Matter, a decentralized racial justice movement established after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin shooting. The book’s title refers to accusations of terrorism lobbed at Cullors and her... Read When They Call You a Terrorist Summary

Published in 2018, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo received critical acclaim and became a New York Times Bestseller for explaining how white people should address racism in the moment and how they can move into a new, healthier, less racist paradigm. DiAngelo holds a PhD in multicultural education and specializes in critical racial and social justice education.Plot SummaryDiAngelo stresses that all white people play... Read White Fragility Summary

Carol Anderson's 2016 nonfiction book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, looks at the way African-American progress has been halted and repressed, again and again, by a powerful cocktail of economic self-interest, fear, and hatred on the part of America's white elites, a philosophy she calls "white rage." The book’s five chapters examine five crucial turning points in the African-American struggle for freedom and equality: Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery, the... Read White Rage Summary

... Read Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race Summary

Why We Can’t Wait is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s history of the Birmingham protests that took place in 1963 and his effort to explain the aims and goals of the Civil Rights Movement to a national audience. King explores the background of the protests in Birmingham, the importance of nonviolence as the primary approach to protest, how this approach played out in Birmingham, and the aftermath of the protests in an introduction and eight chapters... Read Why We Can't Wait Summary