slavery & the civil rights movement
mandatory reading
BOOKS
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin — a short read, powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem, and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, consisting of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans to attack the terrible legacy of racism.
A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis — The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. Award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light.
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (For younger readers, check out Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You) — In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history, dismantling the claim that we're living in a post-racial society.
Slavery by Another Name: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from Civl War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon — Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter. By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou — Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." The first in a seven-volume series, Maya Angelou’s autobiography is a coming-of-age story and beloved American classic that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma.
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson — A powerful true story about the Equal Justice Initiative, Just Mercy at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer's coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley — Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.
ARTICLES
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. Read all the stories.
The Consequences of Forgetting by by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for Jacobin
America’s nonviolent civil rights movement was considered uncivil by critics at the time — Peniel E. Joseph for the Washington Post
The articles in Jacobin’s issue Struggle & Progress
The Civil Rights Movement and the Politics of Memory — Randall Kennedy for the American Prospect
PDF: What the Civil Rights Movement Was and Wasn't — Cass R. Sunstein for the University of Illinois Law Review
How Slavery Made the Modern World — Greg Grandin for The Nation
Taming the Antislavery Revolution — James Oakes for Jacobin
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? By Frederick Douglass
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
BOOKS
1919 by Eve Ewing
Ain’t I A Woman? by bell hooks
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
Freedom's Daughters by Lynn Olson
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life by Terrion L Williamson
Slavery by Another Name: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from Civl War to World War II (Douglas Blackmon)
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (followed by Pillar of Fire, which covers 1963-1965, and At Canaan's Edge, 1965-1968)
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody
Grant by Ron Chernow
Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee by Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass — The final of three autobiographies written by the famed abolitionist.
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A Washington
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E Jones-Rogers
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Robin D.G. Kelley)
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture & Charles V. Hamilton
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Sarah Haley)
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin Kruse
Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Simon Balto)
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson
The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom
Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America by Brett Story
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene Carruthers
The Revolt of the Black Athlete by Harry Edwards
The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools by Susan DuFresne
