Reading List: The African American Experience
Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters, between 1863 and 1865; Library of Congress.
A guest post by Zoya Sattar, APF Research Fellow
In the ongoing fight against racial injustices in America, it is more important than ever for the Pakistani-American community to put in the work to understand race relations in the US, as well as learning how to become better allies in the struggle against systemic inequalities.
Confronting our own biases and learning how to educate those around us are vital steps in the fight for the lives of our Black sisters and brothers.
This reading list is meant to be a starting point for the community to take part in the work that needs to be done to fulfill our country's great promise of equality.
American science fiction author who became the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship.
The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity.
Maya
Angelou
Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise to the heights.
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document.
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States.
Frederick
Douglass
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Born around 1817 in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was a former plantation slave who went on to become a brilliant writer and eloquent orator. In this amazing first-hand narrative, published in 1881, he vividly recounts his early years, which were filled with physical abuse, deprivation, and tragedy; his dramatic escapes to the North, recapture, and eventual freedom; his work for the Anti-Slavery Society and influential role in speaking for other African-Americans; his abolitionist campaigns, and crusade for full civil rights for former slaves.
Autobiography
Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington
"Up From Slavery" is an autobiography of Booker T. Washington's life and work, which has been the source of inspiration for all Americans. Washington reveals his inner most thoughts as he transitions from ex-slave to teacher and founder of one of the most important schools for African Americans in the south, The Tuskegee Industrial Institute. Read the Review
12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
It is a slave narrative of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, as well as describing at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana. Read the Review
Three Years In Europe by William Wells Brown
William Brown escaped from slavery as a child. Brown was still considered a slave at the time of this novel's publication. Three Years in Europe is the first travel book written by a fugitive slave. Read the Review
My Southern Home, or the South & Its People by William Wells Brown
My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People (1880), provides a more intimate description of the relations between southern blacks and whites both before and after the Civil War.The culmination of William Wells Brown's long writing career, "My Southern Home" is the story of Brown's search for a home in a land of slavery and racism. Read the Review
Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by Barack Obama, that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago up until his entry into law school in 1988. Read the Review
Shakur tells her story by going back and forth between the “present” with Shakur's hospitalization, incarceration, pregnancy and trial following the events on the New Jersey State Turnpike; and the “past” with her early childhood schooling, the beginning of her radicalization, and her time as a prominent Black Power and human rights revolutionary. Read the Review
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin. It tells the story of John Grimes, an intelligent teenager in 1930s Harlem, and his relationship to his family and his church. Read the Review
I know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Read the Review
30 Years a Slave by Louis Hughes
30 Years a Slave follows the life of Louis Hughes as he was sold into slavery in 1844. He provides a great deal of information about the complex relationships between slaves and masters, along with graphic accounts of the physical abuse slaves endured, and details about slave markets, slave religion, and the organization of plantation work. Read the Review
Fiction
The Colonel's Dream by Charles Waddell Chestnut
The Colonel's Dream portrays the continuing oppression and racial violence prominent in the Southern United States after the American Civil War. The Colonel's Dream concerns Colonel Henry French and his attempt to refine Clarendon, North Carolina, the southern city in which he grew up, into a racially and socially equal society from the strictly segregationist ways of its past. Read the Review
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche. Read the Review
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by the African Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity. Read the Review
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. Read the Review
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeastern United States during the 19th century, who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantations by following the Underground Railroad. Read the Review
Set after the American Civil War, it is inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery in Kentucky in late January 1856 by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio, a free state. Captured, she killed her child rather than have her taken back into slavery. Read the Review
History
The Rise & Fall of the Confederacy by Governor Jefferson Davis
A decade after his release from federal prison, the 67-year-old Jefferson Davis--ex-president of the Confederacy, --began work on his monumental Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Davis devoted three years and extensive research to what is now a perceptive two-volume chronicle, covering the birth, life, and death of the Confederacy, from the Missouri Compromise in 1820, through the tumultuous events of the Civil War, to the readmission of the Southern states to the U.S. Congress in the late 1860s. Read the Review
Literature
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
The Souls of Black Fold is essential reading for everyone interested in African-American history and the struggle for civil rights in America. In this collection of essays, first published together in 1903, DuBois eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. Read the Review
The Negro Problem by Booker T. Washington
The Negro Problem is a collection of seven essays by prominent Black American writers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Booker T. Washington, and published in 1903. It covers law, education, disenfranchisement, and Black Americans' place in American society. Read the Review
Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
The collected articles tell the tale of Douglass’s harrowing escape from slavery, as well as the subsequent struggle of redressing the inequities of slavery through the Reconstruction period. Read the Review
What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson
What Truth Sounds Like delivers a piercing and wide-ranging analysis of American race relations. The focal point of the book is a 1963 meeting between Sen. Robert Kennedy and a group of notable African-Americans, organized by Kennedy to “sound out the prospects for racial change” during a period of extreme social tension. Read the Review
Non-Fiction
Fifty Years in Chains, or The Life of an American Slave by Charles Ball
One of the earliest and most important slave narratives, this account provides a valuable primary source on early nineteenth-century Southern plantation life. An inspiring story of courage and perseverance, it is essential reading for students of American history and African-American studies. Read the Review
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes blacks to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to "do for themselves", regardless of what they were taught. Read the Review