Summary: Traces the history of black America back to ancient African civilization, examining attempts by the white establishment in the U.S. to conceal this knowledge as a means of undermining African American identity. Presents theories of scholars and social commentators which comprise a history in which African Americans have been systematically oppressed as a people.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2011

Copies Available at Woodmere

Gates, Henry Louis

Summary: "A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box:...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Penguin Press 2024

Copies Available at Kingsley

Imani, Blair

Summary: "A powerful illustrated history of the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop. Over the course of six decades, an unprecedented wave of Black Americans left the South and spread across the nation in search of a better life--a migration that sparked stunning demographic and cultural changes in twentieth-century America....

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Ten Speed Press 2020

Copies Available at Woodmere

Jefferson, Margo

Summary: "Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls "a temperamental autobiography," comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir. Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book's structure is...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Pantheon Books 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Explores the motivation behind European global subjugation, the history of rarely discussed vast West African empires, how germ warfare is used on melanted people, and the history of slave breeding farms in America.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Continues the history of people of African descent, including topics such as the global African presence, the science of melanin, the truth about the prison industrial complex, how thriving black economic communities were undermined in America, hidden truths about Native Americans, and more.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Pitner, Barrett Holmes

Summary: "In this incisive blend of personal narrative and deep philosophical and linguistic inquiry, journalist, filmmaker, and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner identifies a linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. "Ethnocide," first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term genocide), describes the systemic erasure of a people's ancestral...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Counterpoint 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Norris, Michele

Summary: "Our Hidden Conversations is a unique compilation of stories, richly reported essays, and photographs providing a window into America during a tumultuous era. This powerful book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories."--

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Simon & Schuster 2024

Copies Available at Woodmere

Holloway, Jonathan Scott.

Summary: "How do we balance the desire for tales of exceptional accomplishment with the need for painful doses of reality? How hard do we work to remember our past or to forget it? These are some of the questions that Jonathan Scott Holloway addresses in this exploration of race memory from the dawn of the modern civil rights era to the present. Relying on social science, documentary film, dance,...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: The University of North Carolina Press 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Contents: The history of African warfare -- The consumption of blackness -- Psychological attacks on Blackness -- Biological attacks on Blackness -- Sexual attacks on Blackness -- How entertainment is weaponized -- Black resistance against white supremacy.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives--but not everyone regularly sees...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Ballantine Books 2018

Copies Available at Peninsula

Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne

Summary: To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering shocking and unexpected tales of ancestors--Black, Indigenous, and white--in the deep South.

Format: sound recording-nonmusical

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Jefferson, Margo

Summary: "At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned to distance itself from whites and the black generality, while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in 1947 in upper-crust black Chicago--her...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Pantheon Books 2015

Copies Available at Woodmere

Davidson, James West.

Contents: Into a changing world -- A moral education -- Unladylike lady -- Edged tools -- Ambition to edit -- They say -- Do something -- Exiled.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Oxford University Press 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Byrd, Ayana D

Summary: A chronicle of black hair in America looks back at the styles, myths, and grooming techniques adopted by African Americans throughout their history.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: St Martins Pr 2014

Copies Available at Woodmere

Thompson, Clifford

Summary: "An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America. In the tradition of James Baldwin's TheFire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson's What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Other Press 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Walker, Jerald

Summary: "Personal essays exploring identity, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture. Confronts the medical profession's racial biases, shopping while black at Whole Foods, the legacy of Michael Jackson, raising black boys, haircuts that scare white people, racial profiling, and growing up in Southside Chicago"--

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press 2020

Copies Available at Woodmere

Colby, Tanner.

Summary: Chronicles the United States' troubling relationship with race as reflected by four historical events, including the integration of a racist Birmingham school system and a Kansas City neighborhood's fight against housing discrimination.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Viking 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Woodtor, Dee.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Random House 1999

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Employing a mix of documentary, performance, poetry, and music in his work, the transformative filmmaker Marlon Riggs was an unapologetic gay Black man who defied a culture of silence and shame to speak his truth with resounding joy and conviction.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere