Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins | Puffin Books, 1999 | Book
This sets the record straight about Rosa Parks’s heroic act of refusing to give up her seat to a white patron in Montgomery Alabama in 1955. What we learn, among many other things, is that Parks was anything but old, tired and spontaneous in her history-changing act.
James Baldwin | Vintage, 1992 | Book
Though published in 1962, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is essential reading if you want to understand why the whitewashing of history and culture is so prevalent in our country.
Douglas A. Blackmon | Anchor, 2009 | Book
Douglas A. Blackmon documents a little-known history about the debt-peonage system that essentially became another form of enslavement for a significant swarth of black folks in the South and beyond, following Reconstruction.
W.E.B. Du Bois | Dover Publications, 2016 | Book
Part-history book, part-memoir, and part-manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk helps put the plight of black Americans in the early 20th century into perspective.
Michelle Alexander | The New Press, 2012 | Book
A must-read book that explores how the criminal justice system disproportionately targets black men for incarceration and then criminalizes their bodies long after they have served their time in prison or “repaid” their debt to society.
David H. Ikard
| Indiana University Press, 2013 | Book
I explore the various ways that blacks have tried to combat structural inequalities and racial oppression from slavery to the present — and why these attempts have only produced moderate outcomes.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
| Spiegel & Grau, 2015 | Book
Timothy B. Tyson | Broadway Books, 2005 | Book