Black History Books for the Whole Year

Black History Books for the Whole Year February was Black History Month in the U.S. That usually means that most Americans spend 28 days  hearing a little bit  about black historyabout Martin Luther King, about Harriet Tubman, about the Tuskegee Airmen and Langston Hughesand then 337, well, not hearing much of anything about it. Black history gets smushed into the shortest month of the year and left unexplored and confronted for the rest. Thats why  #28daysarenotenough. Started by author and artist  Joel Christian Gill, #28daysarenotenough is a social media movement encouraging  people to learn and talk about black history 365 days out of the year, as he  explained to the Philadelphia Tribune: What is it when we finally separate our history out from all the other histories of the world? When we separate LGBTQI, Latino history or women’s history[?] Who fought and died for America more than the enslaved people of the United States? People who risked everything just so they could make their own choices? And so, when you take that and look at it, 28 days aren’t enough to talk about that. I agree. Which is why I developed this reading guide  to reading black history for the other 337. Heres the plan: for each month, Ill suggest a book or two (sometimes thematically tied to that month, sometimes not; sometimes formal history, sometimes not) that explore different aspects of black history. This isnt a prescription; there arent rules and  theres no right way to go about this. But if you think that #28daysarenotenough, this guide is one way you can try to fix it, to make black history  part of your life not just for  28 days but for 365 and beyond. MARCH March  usually marks the beginning of the rest of the year,  the time when we  dont  talk about black history very much. The 28 days are over, and thats that. And weve usually heard a whole lot about the big names in black history, the Kings and the Tubmans, for the four weeks prior. So what better way to kick off a year of refusing that divisionrefusing the end of  black historythan by focusing on little-known figures and often-ignored cases? (Another bonus: both of these books are graphic histories, a small but totally amazing sub-genre.) Strange Fruit, Volume I: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History  by  Joel Christian Gill This is an especially appropriate book to start your years worth of black history reading because its author is the one who started the #28daysarenotenough hashtag. Its also an exciting, fascinating book: a graphic exploration of little-known people and events in black history. Covering a wide range of topics, from the first black stage magician (!) to  letters written by a former slave,  Strange Fruit  manages to be both a whole lot of fun and a serious examination of black history and mainstream ignorance. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History  by  Trevor R. Getz Liz Clarke Based on a  young womans 1876 suit for freedom, Abina and the Important Men  tells a fascinating story with lot  to teach us about how gender, colonialism, and slavery interacted in one womans life and in the history of our world. With its emphasis on how historical documents both  record and erase the past, this book is rigorous and accessible at the same time, and its a great  way to start exploring black history as world history. APRIL April has often been a month of major, important shifts in African American history.  The Civil War formally began on  April 12, 1861, for example, and Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. This month, read  books that are related to these  two events. I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era  by  David Williams One of the most important transformations that historical scholarship on the Civil War has undergone in the last decades has been a shift  toward recognizing the active roles that slaves played in freeing themselves. They werent just passive figures, waiting for the  great white Lincoln to save them. Instead many  escaped and resisted during the war in ways that changed their own lives and forced  Lincoln to  more actively pursue the end of slavery in America. Williamss book is one of a number of recent volumes to explore this crucial, often-overlooked history. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.  edited by  James M. Washington   Most of us have heard or read at least parts of Kings I Have a Dream speech or Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And thats great, but King wrote a lot more than that, much of it collected in this volume. Explore the depth and complexity of Kings thought as you  experience the beauty and urgency  of his writing. MAY It was in May, 1954, that the legal architecture of Jim Crowthe doctrine of separate but equalwas struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in  Brown v. Board of Education. So for May, here are  a couple of books on the history and  present  of segregation in America. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South  by  William H. Chafe and Raymond Gavins Oral history is an especially powerful medium for recording and telling black historyit lets the people who lived the past speak for themselves while  using the historians eye to shape a larger narrative out of  myriad individual stories. And Jim Crow is especially well-suited for the oral history treatment.  Jim Crow was a legal system but it wasnt just that. It was a total social structure that infiltrated and influenced every aspect  everyday life in the  South (from work to recreation to sexuality to commerce and beyond). It makes special sense, then, to hear directly from people who lived through it. This incredible volume, drawn from collections held at Duke University, does just that and more. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  by  Michelle Alexander Legal segregation supposedly ended in 1954 (or 1964, or), but as Alexander argues here, racial segregation didnt endit just changed forms. Focusing on mass incarceration and the massive growth of the prison-industrial complex, Alexander puts the present in the context of the past and the future, a task undertaken by the best black history books and one that helps us make better sense of the world around us.  This is  the history of now. JUNE Black feminism absolutely is central to black history, so in June we explore its depth and diversity.  For your second book this month, pick one of the  women featured in  Words of Fire  and read a book by or about her. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought  by  Beverly Guy-Sheftall (editor) I was assigned this book in a college course, and Ive genuinely never been the same. The title isnt an exaggerationthese are words that  sear and burn and light. Collecting thinkers from  Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth to bell hooks and Barbara Smith, this  anthology captures the wide range and incredible diversity of black feminist thought over the past centuries. JULY In addition to fireworks, hot dogs, and patriotic bunting, July is also a time when we celebrate freedom. That celebration has always been more  fraught for African AmericansWhat to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass famously demandedon whose bondage the  land of the free was built. For this month, well tackle freedom from two directions: first, by looking at how race and slavery helped create what became the United States; and second, by exploring  one way black Americans tried to  make freedom for themselves in difficult circumstances. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia  by  Kathleen M. Brown First off: the title. Thats reason enough to read this book, but theres actually many more reasons. Its a hugely respected examination of the way gender and race interacted with and influenced  one another in colonial Virginia. Youll learn about how gender ideologies helped create race as we know it today, leading to race slavery (a good foundation for next months reading) and to the transformation, in turn, of how gender worked, as well. Browns masterful treatment  about how Bacons Rebellion changed the fate of what became the United States, consolidating a white patriarchal elite, is among the  important arguments any historian of early America has made in the past few decades. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration  by  Isabel Wilkerson The list of awards this book won is long, but even that doesnt quite cover how important this book is. The Great Migrationthe movement of millions of African Americans from the South to the North, especially industrial cities, from the 1910s to the 1960sis one of the most important  events in black history, but it gets way less attention than many others. Wilkersons book  is helping to change that. Exhaustively researched and contextualized, but with a wealth of personal details (the result of oral history work in evidence here),  The Warmth of Other Sons  tells the story of African Americans working for freedom and building  new lives in new places. AUGUST The first enslaved Africans brought to  British  North American reportedly arrived in August 1619, beginning two and a half centuries of slavery and four centuries of  oppression and inequality for black people in what became the United States. So  for August, well focus our attention on the history of slavery. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market  by  Walter Johnson One of the most fundamental features of slaverybut one that remains difficult to wrap our heads around  a hundred and fifty years after its abolitionis the literal buying and selling of human beings. Johnsons  Soul by Soul  forces us to confront that fact as it examines in excruciating, fascinating, important  detail how slave markets worked. What he uncovers, using a huge range of sources, is both more horrifying and more complex than expected. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route  by  Saidiya Hartman Part memoir, part academic history, part travelogue, Hartmans  Lose Your Mother  is a devastating and insightful exploration of both how the slave trade worked and how it still affects  the lives of black people around the world today. Its a book thats born out of  and narrates  a complex, circuitous attempt to trace Hartmans  own lineagea lineage that was ruptured and obscured by the violent displacement of slavery. Its beautiful and devastating and absolutely crucial. SEPTEMBER The first Monday in September is supposed to be a day  on which we recognize the contributions of the labor movement in  the making of the U.S. This year, instead of the usual half-hearted celebration (often limited to one last barbecue and an end to white shoes), read a couple of books about African Americans and work in the U.S. Race Rebels : Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class  by  Robin D.G. Kelley This is a classic, foundational text in black working-class history, and for good reason. With passion and critical insight, Kelley explores various moments in African American history when working-class African Americans fought back. But, and this is where Kelleys work is especially interesting, he focuses not on the standard institutions, but rather on everyday activities and cultural practices.  For example, one of the most interesting topics explored in this book  is the history of pan-toting, a practice where black domestic workers in the Jim Crow South would take their employers leftovers home with them (toting a pan of food back home) as a way of resisting the low pay and low levels of respect offered them in the workplace. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present  by  Jacqueline Jones In this book, Jones tracks  how black women worked under slavery and after it, exploring  how  their roles changed as the country changed (or in some ways didnt) around them.  Using a fundamentally intersectional analysis, Jones examines how  race and gender worked together to shape expectations for and experiences of black women, with a special focus on the family. OCTOBER October is LGBT/queer history month (thirty-one days arent enough, either), so this is a great month to read about LGBTQ  African Americans and explore  black queer thought. For extra credit,  read some work  by Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, or Richard Bruce Nugent. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches  by  Audre Lorde This is one of those amazing books that is a fascinating product of history  and  at the same time  a maker of history itself. These hugely powerful essays and speeches both captured and fueled  a crucial moment when queer black women  resisted  feminist, gay rights, and civil rights movements that excluded, ignored, or undermined the contributions of black women and especially black lesbiansand insisted on  intersectionality  as they key to justice. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,  Samuel Delaney These essays by  Delaneyauthor of science fiction novels and queer black fictionare about what was lost when Times Square went Disney. Part personal history, part eulogy, part jeremiad against gentrification,  Times Square Red, Times Square Blue  is a challenging and beautiful argument about  how sexuality, race, and class shape cities and our  experiences of them. When youre done with  Times Square Red, go  explore his fiction. Youll be happy you did. NOVEMBER In the U.S., November is typically a month when we celebrate the colonization of North America. Colonialism was and remains, of course, a source of great violence and suffering in world historyand thats true of black history, as well. For a second book, pick one  from this list of recommended books about Native American history and think about connections between what you learn  and what youve read so far this year about black history. Discourse on Colonialism  by  Aimé Césaire This glorious, small little essay by an author and politician from Martinique, is a stinging and yet beautiful indictment of colonialism. Its bright and rhythmic (Césaire was a poet, after all), and cuts through the lies  that powered colonialism, as well as  liberal humanists willful ignorance in the face of that depravity: And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance.  It hurts, but its supposed to. DECEMBER December is a month when many of us  take opportunities to  reflect on  the role religion plays in our lives,  whatever were observing (or not observing) this time of year. So this month, were going to look at religion, with a focus  on  autobiographies  that often use religion to frame memories of crucial periods in African American history. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass  by  Frederick Douglass This is such a classic that many of us read it in school. But its a classic for a reasonand its worth re-reading. Like Audre Lordes  Sister Outsider, Douglasss  Narrative  is a book that captures a moment that was transformed by its publication. He offers a brilliant,  passionate glimpse of the horrors of slavery and a clear view of the strength that drove him. In particular, Douglass highlights  Christian faith (along with literacy, with which it was linked) as crucial to his story and the story of slavery. Indeed, Douglasss  Narrative  is a great way into the complex,  somehow both troubling and empowering history of Christianity and  bondage in the U.S. Lovesong: Becoming a Jew  by  Julius Lester Heres an unfamiliar,  fascinating angle on the conversion narrative: the  autobiographical tale of a black Methodist ministers son who grew up in the South, moved to New York, became an activist, and converted to Judaism. Its a story about black identity, Jewish heritage, civil rights, and a fascinating life lived across the twentieth century. Lester is the author of many more booksincluding the Newberry-winning, black-history-focused  To Be a Slaveso consider seeking one of them out to continue your exploration. JANUARY January is a month for looking aheadplanning, hoping, resolving. And so for this month, to round out our year of black history, I  want you to look ahead in your own reading and think about how black history and black experiences can be a bigger part of your reading going forward. One suggestion: go browse the We Need Diverse Books website, pick a book mentioned there, and celebrate diversity in your reading. ____________________ Follow us on Twitter for more bookish goodness! Sign up for True Story to receive nonfiction news, new releases, and must-read forthcoming titles.