Lists
by Powell's Books, February 6, 2018 9:24 AM
From the Great Migration to cancer research, these five fascinating books delve into critical elements of the African American experience. See here for a more extensive list of great books on African American history.
The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson
Given that the Great Migration lasted from 1915-1970 and involved the movement of almost six million people from the South to the North, it’s really surprising that more of us don’t learn about it in school. Wilkerson’s magisterial history captures the enormity of the movement via a close examination of three individual journeys: Ida Gladney, a sharecropper who moved from Mississippi to Chicago; George Starling, who left Florida to fight for civil rights in Harlem; and Robert Foster, who moved north to pursue a successful medical career. With extensive research that recalls the empathy and demographic detail of Studs Terkel, and exquisite prose, Wilkerson brings to life the Great Migration and its vast effects on the social, political, and economic fabric of American life.
Blood at the Root
by Patrick Phillips
Poet Patrick Phillips turns his keen eye to his home state of Georgia in this disturbing but critical piece of US history. Forsyth County, Georgia, was home to a large and diverse African American community until the early 20th century, when a vigilante mob drove every black citizen out of town and burned down their homes, businesses and churches. Somehow evading both the civil rights movement and institutional memories of the violence used to destroy a prospering black community (not to mention memories of that community itself), Forsyth County remained all-white until the 1990s. Using his childhood memories and meticulous historical research as a guide, Phillips examines how a town can erase and rewrite its past on behalf of racial injustice, and how that erasure continues to define much of America.
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
by Paul Ortiz
Ortiz places African American and Latinx struggles for political and labor rights front and center in this paradigm-shifting history of the United States. Focusing primarily on the US’s relationship with Latin America, Ortiz demonstrates how black and Latinx scholars and organizers from across the Americas played a essential role in fighting for and establishing civil rights in the US, and in battling US imperialism. Both radical and reasonable, An African American and Latinx History is a bracing and necessary corrective to the white-washed American history most of us learn in school.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
In the words of Powell’s bookseller Dianah, “Shaved from a tumor in a poor black woman in the 1950s, cultured without her knowledge, and grown to amazing proportions, HeLa cells would change the face of science and medicine forever. Pivotal in the search for disease obliteration, HeLa would prove invaluable because it simply would not die. Yet HeLa’s progenitor, Henrietta Lacks, did die — in pain and obscurity, and her family knew nothing of her living cells. Posing some very serious questions on tissue ownership, the billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, the mad rush for the elusive cure for cancer, and the impossible cost of health insurance, Skloot has done an admirable job of research here. Ironically, Henrietta's story, if read in a novel, would seem ridiculously fantastical. Yet she lived — and her cells still do. Her story is unforgettable.” This absorbing book highlights how minority and impoverished bodies were regarded as public property long after the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of that regard on Lacks’s family specifically and medical research more broadly.
Never Caught: The Washingtons and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
We recommend this book for a couple of reasons. First off, it’s a really great read. Everyone knows that George Washington was our first president, but fewer people know that he owned slaves — or that, as president, he routinely circumvented state law to avoid having to liberate them. Ona Judge was one such slave, and historian Erica Dunbar’s chronicle of her escape from slavery and Washington’s crazed manhunt to recapture her is fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful. But Never Caught isn’t just an exciting work of narrative nonfiction; it’s a crucial reminder that most of the facts that we learn about America’s Founding Fathers gloss over their personal involvement in slavery. Say what you like about Washington being a man of his time, our societal impulse to focus on his mythology instead of on the historical record makes it that much harder to come to a consensus about the institutional racism at the heart of American democracy. Dunbar’s riveting book helps to direct the national conversation about Washington in a far more nuanced and frankly more interesting direction.
Check out our other recommended reading lists for Black History Month:
Recommended Reading: Black Lives Matter
Recommended Reading: Kids' Books
Recommended Reading: Feminism
Recommended Reading: Arts and Culture
|