Black Studies from I Cannot Live Without Books

Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom by Keisha N. Blain In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers… Read more about this item

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave-trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave… Read more about this item

Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement by Jessie Morgan-Owens THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John… Read more about this item

African Europeans: An Untold History by Olivette Otele As early as the third century, St. Maurice -- an Egyptian -- became leader of the legendary Roman Theban Legion. Ever since there have been richly varied encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans." Yet Africans and African Europeans are still widely believed to be only a recent presence in… Read more about this item

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of… Read more about this item

Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia by Thomas Healy THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. In 1969, with America's cities in turmoil and racial tensions high, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick announced an audacious plan: he would build a new city in rural North Carolina, open to all but intended primarily… Read more about this item

The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Lawrence T. Brown The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly -- a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population… Read more about this item

Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America by Curtis Bunn, Michael H. Cottman, Patrice Gaines, Nick Charles, and Keith Harriston For many, the weeks of protests in the summer of 2020 began with the horrific nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds when police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on camera, and it ended with the sweeping federal,… Read more about this item

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond… Read more about this item

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970,… Read more about this item

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free,… Read more about this item

Olympic Pride, American Prejudice: The Untold Story of 18 African Americans Who Defied Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler to Compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Deborah Riley Draper and Travis Thrasher THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. Set against the turbulent backdrop of a segregated United States, sixteen black men and two black women are torn… Read more about this item

Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person with Richard Rooker At eighteen, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. civil rights movement who left Washington, D.C., by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans. This purposeful mix of black and white, male and female activists -- including future… Read more about this item

Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel In 1921 Tulsa's Greenwood District, known then as the nation's "Black Wall Street," was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. But on May 31 of that year a white mob, inflamed by rumors that a young black man had attempted to rape a white teenage girl, invaded… Read more about this item

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico. In South to Freedom historian… Read more about this item

Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America by Karen Cook Bell Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual… Read more about this item

A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a… Read more about this item

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged settlement by free African Americans and restricted their rights to testify… Read more about this item

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Popular accounts of the suffrage crusade often begin in Seneca Falls in 1848 and end with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most Black women. To secure their… Read more about this item

The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality by Anna-Lisa Cox When black settlers Keziah and Charles Grier started clearing their frontier land in 1818, they couldn't know that they were part of the nation's earliest struggle for equality; they were just looking to build a better life. But within a dew years,… Read more about this item