Fiction
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Multiple voices illuminate a household in the unsettled world of seventeenth-century colonial America.
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113 books
Drama
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
A Chicago family debates how to use an inheritance and faces resistance to moving into a new home.
Poetry
Affrilachia
Frank X Walker
Walker’s poems insist on the visibility of Black lives in the language and geography of Appalachia.
Essays
All About Love
bell hooks
hooks examines love as a practice that can shape personal relationships and public life.
Memoir
Assata
Assata Shakur
Shakur recounts her upbringing, political organizing, imprisonment, and experiences with the legal system.
Oral history
Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston records Cudjo Lewis’s account of captivity, the Atlantic crossing, and life in Africatown.
Essays
Belonging: A Culture of Place
bell hooks
Essays on place, race, land, and return connect hooks’s Kentucky roots with a wider ethic of belonging.
Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A mother and daughter reckon with the afterlife of slavery in a house haunted by a child’s return.
History
Black Against Empire
Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr.
A history of the Black Panther Party follows its organizing strategies and the pressures that weakened it.
History
Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970
Lynne Fauley Emery
A historical survey traces Black dance across social, theatrical, and professional settings.
History
Black Reconstruction in America
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois centers Black workers and political participation in an account of Reconstruction and its overthrow.
Music history
Blues People
Amiri Baraka
Baraka reads changes in Black music alongside changes in work, migration, and social life.
Memoir
Bone Black
bell hooks
Fragmentary memories trace the making of a writer in a Black Southern family.
Poetry
Buffalo Dance
Frank X Walker
A sequence of poems imagines the perspective of York, the enslaved participant in the Lewis and Clark expedition.
History
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson compares inherited hierarchies across societies to examine how inequality is made durable.
Fiction
Clotel
William Wells Brown
Brown’s novel follows women navigating slavery and family separation in the early United States.
Fiction
Conjure Women
Afia Atakora
A mother and daughter practice healing in a community struggling through the transition from slavery to freedom.
Biography
Dream Boogie
Peter Guralnick
A biography follows Cooke from gospel performance into popular music and independent business ventures.
Biography
Duke
Terry Teachout
The life of Duke Ellington opens onto the daily business of maintaining a touring orchestra.
Music history
Feel Like Going Home
Peter Guralnick
Profiles of performers and record makers offer a listener’s path into blues and early rock and roll.
Drama
Fences
August Wilson
A Pittsburgh family negotiates the consequences of one man’s disappointments, decisions, and obligations.
Literary criticism
Free Within Ourselves
Rudine Sims Bishop
A study of Black children’s literature follows its publishing history, creators, and evolving traditions.
Oral history
Freedom on the Border
Catherine Fosl, Tracy E. K'Meyer
Kentuckians’ oral histories illuminate the work of challenging segregation across the state.
History
From Slavery to Freedom
John Hope Franklin
A broad historical survey provides context for the institutions and struggles behind local stories.