As we work our way through Black History month we are exploring the ways which God calls us to understand the suffering of our brothers and sisters, to educate ourselves, and to pray for change in our nation and our own hearts.
Black History Reading List
Curated by Bill “Doc” McLaurin, February 2021
Black History
The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Law
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Case for Reparations The Atlanic June 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity and A. Kristen Mullen
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
Black Personality
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism by Derek Bell
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Civil Rights
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.
Family and Classics
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Fences by August Wilson
The Best of Simple: Stories by Langston Hughes
Our kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham
The Street by Ann Petry
Education & Intellectual
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership by Harold Cruse
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys by Jawanza Kunjufu
Black Heroes
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglas
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley by Alex Haley
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
Black Sisters
Beloved by Toni Morrison
In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of Black Sorority Movement by Paula Giddings
Sports
Beyond A Boundary by C. L. R. James
Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson by Wil Haygood