LIST: 10 Books About Black Pioneers Everyone Should Read During Black History Month
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By Kimberly Fain
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (2009) by David Levering Lewis
American historian David Levering Lewis, a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of Race, 1868-1919. In 2001, Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer again for W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Du Bois was a sociologist, writer, and editor who was born during the Reconstruction Era and, incredibly, lived until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Du Bois’s theorization about race makes him one of America’s greatest intellectuals. By combining two award-winning books about him into one volume, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, provides an eminently powerful read.
The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (2011) by Howard Bryant
ESPN writer Howard Bryant has written books on athletic legends in tennis, basketball, football, and baseball. In The Last Hero, he explores the life of baseball legend Henry “Hank” Aaron. When Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s baseball record for home runs, he would hold that pivotal stat for 33 years. Aaron, who impressed fans with his grace on and off the field, much like Jackie Robinson before him, was an icon of civil rights as well as baseball. As he moved closer to his home run goal, he persevered despite racist death threats, and he continued to fight for racial justice until his death in 2021.
Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (2015) by Wil Haygood
In Showdown, Wil Haygood uses Thurgood Marshall’s five-day Senate confirmation hearing to narrate his trailblazing legal work. Before Marshall was America’s first Black Supreme Court Justice, he won landmark civil rights cases—including Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Sweatt v. Painter (1950), and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Brown, Marshall’s most well-known case, overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine and ordered school desegregation. It was not an easy path, but Marshall’s career from small-time lawyer to the highest court in the land transformed America.
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016) by Margot Lee Shetterly
Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, became world-famous when it was made into a hit Hollywood film. Until then, both the book and its subjects, NASA’s gifted Black women mathematicians were little known. By centering the narrative on Christine Darden, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan, Shetterly made visible the work and personal lives of a group of truly legendary women. When World War II labor shortages caused a shift in the job market, these extraordinary Black math teachers resigned from segregated public schools and joined the aeronautics industry, where their genius led them to be hailed as NASA’s “human computers.” Living, as we do, in an age that is in desperate need of heroes, it is no wonder Hidden Figures and its amazing subjects struck such a chord.
Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) by Vanessa K. Valdés
Diasporic Blackness narrates the story of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, whose name is well known to New Yorkers from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center, where scholars come from around the world to study the African Diaspora. Valdés recounts the story of Schomburg, a noted Black Puerto-Rican scholar, collector, and archivist whose personal library was the inspiration for the world-renowned Schomburg Center. Valdés brilliantly explores Schomburg’s dual Afro-Latino identity, and how it impacted his life’s work – which has shined a light for scholars of the African-American experience since the Harlem Renaissance.
Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Survived Slavery and Became Millionaires (2018) by Shomari Wills
Black Fortunes focuses on Black millionaires Robert Reed Church, Hannah Elias, O. W. Gurley, Mary Ellen Pleasant, Annie Turnbo-Malone, and Madam C. J Walker. Church faced near death experiences on multiple occasions, yet he became Tennessee’s largest landowner. Real estate owner Elias was once the wealthiest African American woman. Gurley was known for selling land to Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Eventually, whose prosperous Black Greenwood District became known as “Black Wall Street.” Pleasant acquired her wealth in the California Gold Rush. Chemist Turnbo-Malone and Walker developed hair care products that revolutionized the styling of Black hair. As Wills describes the determination of these African-Americans born during slavery and the decade of Emancipation, his gripping true narrative reads like an unforgettable novel.
Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster (2018) by Stephen L. Carter
Carter, who served as law clerk to Thurgood Marshall before becoming a Yale law professor, has become one of the leading chroniclers of the Black American experience. In Invisible, he shares an incredible story that comes from close to home: the life of his pioneering grandmother Eunice Hunton Carter. Carter was the first Black woman prosecutor in the New York District Attorney’s Office. While working for District Attorney Thomas Dewey, Eunice Carter devised a legal strategy that was integral to the conviction of crime boss Charlie “Lucky” Luciano. As her grandson relates, Carter overcame prejudice and career roadblocks to leave an indelible mark on the law.
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018) by Imani Perry
In Looking for Lorraine, which won the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, historian Imani Perry wrote brilliantly about the award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Although Hansberry died at just 34, she managed in her brief life to produce one of the most beloved, and influential, works of American theater. A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman, was a perfectly timed indictment of the racism Blacks have endured in America, and the ways in which they have resisted and risen above it. It won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle best play award in 1959, and became a touchstone for civil rights activists and artists in the 1960s and beyond. Perry shows that in her short life, Hansberry was not only a brilliant artist, but an activist, whose devotion to the civil rights struggle caused the FBI to place her under surveillance.
Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography (2021) by Donald Bogle
Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black woman nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award – who was famously played, in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), by Halle Berry, the first Black woman to win a Best Actress Academy Award. Historian Donald Bogle brilliantly tells the story of Dandridge’s remarkable life, from integrating nightclubs to performing alongside some of the greatest actors of her time. Dandridge starred with Harry Belafonte and Pearl Bailey in the hit musical Carmen Jones (1954), and with Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr. in the musical Porgy and Bess (1959). Despite her talent, ambition, and fame, she struggled to find challenging roles – but she opened the door for many great Black actresses who arrived after her.
Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (2022) by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Legal Historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin tells the incredible story of legal giant Constance Baker Motley. Born into a working-class family in 1921, when expectations for Black women were narrow, Motley had no plans of working within the confines of societal limitations. Instead, she defied racial-gender expectations and achieved many Black-woman firsts. Motley became the first African American woman attorney to argue before the Supreme Court, and as the only Black woman on NAACP’s legal team, she helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). As Brown-Nagin relates, there were more firsts to come: Motley became the first African American woman State Senator for New York, and the first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary.
Kimberly Fain is an attorney, and teaches African American literature at Texas Southern University. She has two published books: Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature and Black Hollywood: From Butlers to Superheroes, the Changing Role of African American Men in the Movies. Follow her on Twitter at @KimberlyFain
