Folklore
Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston collects folktales and practices from Florida and New Orleans, listening to the people who keep them alive.
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113 books
Essays
Music Is History
Questlove
Questlove uses records and listening memories to consider how music registers public change.
Memoir
Music Is My Mistress
Duke Ellington
Ellington remembers the musicians, places, and collaborations behind his work as a bandleader.
Memoir
My Bondage and My Freedom
Frederick Douglass
Douglass revisits the details of his enslavement and expands on his life in the abolitionist movement.
Memoir
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Douglass describes enslavement, his pursuit of literacy, and his emergence as an abolitionist.
Memoir
Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
William Wells Brown
Brown describes enslavement and escape, illuminating a life that began near Lexington and led into abolitionism.
Memoir
Nina Simone's Gum
Warren Ellis
A small object saved after a Nina Simone performance becomes a meditation on musical memory.
Essays
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Baldwin brings personal grief and cultural criticism into conversation across these early essays.
Speculative fiction
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler
Lauren Olamina responds to social collapse by developing a belief system and seeking a community.
Fiction
Passing
Nella Larsen
A reunion between two childhood acquaintances unsettles the social boundaries each has learned to navigate.
Poetry
Perfect Black
Crystal Wilkinson
Poems consider color, family, girlhood, and the landscapes that shaped Wilkinson’s sense of home.
Memoir
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts
Crystal Wilkinson
Recipes and recollections connect Appalachian foodways with the stories of Black women across generations.
Biography
Princess Noire
Nadine Cohodas
The book follows Simone’s musical education, performance career, and political commitments.
Fiction
Quicksand
Nella Larsen
Helga Crane moves between institutions, cities, and countries in search of a place she can inhabit freely.
Biography
Respect
David Ritz
A biography examines the gospel inheritance and recording career behind Franklin’s public sound.
Music history
Respect Yourself
Robert Gordon
Stax Records offers a vantage point on Memphis soul, collaboration, and the pressures surrounding the label.
Poetry
Rice
Nikky Finney
Rice ties family stories and foodways to Black Southern histories of labor and survival.
Fiction
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
A family in coastal Mississippi prepares for Katrina as a teenage narrator pieces together what it means to care for others.
History
Schooling the Freed People
Ronald E. Butchart
A history of the teachers and institutions that helped build schools in the first decades after emancipation.
History
Self-Taught
Heather Andrea Williams
The book follows Black people’s pursuit of reading and schooling before, during, and after the Civil War.
Fiction
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
A Mississippi family road trip brings the living into contact with histories that refuse to stay buried.
Fiction
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead follows family stories south in a novel about inheritance, naming, and flight.
Essays
South to America
Imani Perry
Perry travels across the South to consider how the region’s places and contradictions shape the nation.
History
Stamped from the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi
Five historical figures provide points of entry into changing ideas about race and their political uses.