Fiction
The Mothers
Brit Bennett
A Southern California church community looks back on the choices and relationships that bound three young people together.
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113 books
History
The Negro in the Making of America
Benjamin Quarles
Quarles traces African American participation in the making of American political and social institutions.
History
The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander
Alexander traces the legal and political machinery of mass incarceration and its consequences after sentencing.
History
The Other Slavery
Andrés Reséndez
A historical study traces the enslavement of Indigenous people across the Americas and its persistence after bans.
Drama
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson
A carved piano forces siblings to decide what they owe their family’s history and their futures.
Essays
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois explores emancipation’s aftermath, segregated education, and the experience he calls double consciousness.
Fiction
The Street
Ann Petry
Lutie Johnson struggles to build security for herself and her son in wartime Harlem.
Fiction
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett
Twin sisters leave their Southern hometown and build separate lives shaped by different choices about racial identity.
History
The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
Three lives trace the distinct routes and consequences of the Great Migration.
Short stories
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes
Short fiction captures the shifting bargains of race and class across American life.
Fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford tells the story of three marriages and the hard-won authority to describe her own life.
History
Trouble in Mind
Leon F. Litwack
Oral histories and contemporary records trace how Black Southerners lived through the rise of Jim Crow.
Poetry
Turn Me Loose
Frank X Walker
Poems use distinct voices to consider the killing of Medgar Evers and the persistence of public memory.
Memoir
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington
Washington recounts his path from enslavement to leadership at Tuskegee and sets out his educational philosophy.
Memoir
Walking with the Wind
John Lewis, Michael D'Orso
Lewis recalls the practical training, collective decisions, and personal risks behind movement campaigns.
Short stories
Water Street
Crystal Wilkinson
Linked stories enter the lives of neighbors in a small Kentucky community, revealing their private and shared histories.
Speculative fiction
Wild Seed
Octavia E. Butler
Two long-lived figures clash over control, survival, and the meaning of kinship.