By Kimberly Fain

1. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 by W. E. B. Du Bois (1935)

W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist and historian, was born in 1868, squarely in the middle of the Reconstruction Era. In this classic text, Du Bois radically revaluates that era and American democracy by challenging previously conceived and racist notions of blackness. Despite African Americans’ progress after the Civil War, their valiant efforts were met with White supremacist violence that preceded the Jim Crow era of segregation. Du Bois brilliantly examines Black agency in the Reconstruction era and establishes how formerly enslaved Blacks were integral to American democracy.

2. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963)

James Baldwin, one of the great writers, speakers, and thinkers of the 20th century, had a foreboding tone and sense of urgency in this book, one of his most famous works. The Fire Next Time is composed of two epistolary essays, in which he unabashedly speaks to both Black and White audiences in a segregated and violent America. One letter is addressed to his nephew on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The other is directed to the broader American audience. While this prominent Civil Rights era text warns of the dire consequences of racial injustice, it is also a cautionary tale against both complacent attitudes and incremental progress.  

3. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)

Octavia E. Butler, a MacArthur Fellow and Pen Center West Lifetime Achievement Award winner, was a much-admired science fiction writer. The Parable of the Sower, which Butler – who died in 2006 – wrote three decades ago, has received renewed acclaim and growing interest due to its focus on climate change and social injustice. Butler’s novel is set in a community in California, in a dystopian future. When the story begins, the African American protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is fifteen years old and living on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Once Lauren’s gated community is barraged by a state of lawlessness, to maintain her survival, she must journey out into a perilous world. Resisting the authoritarianism around her, Lauren forms the Earthseed religion and founds a new society with those who believe that their future rests beyond the planet Earth.

4. Paradise by Toni Morrison (1997)

Toni Morrison, who won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, transformed the way writers in America spoke about race. Though Paradise is one of her lesser-known novels, it was critically acclaimed for its prevailing threads of folklore and history. While contemplating the tangled web of gender, race, and religion, Morrison centers her multi-layered narrative in two communities in rural Oklahoma. From the novel’s start, the audience is confronted with shocking violence. Two feuding communities are wrestling with their past. Ruby is a patriarchal, small, all-black town established by freed enslaved descendants. Convent is a nearby house inhabited by women outcasts. With Paradise, Morrison creates complex Black feminist characters, while making a powerful statement about generational trauma and intraracial violence.

5. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)

Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner and Guggenheim fellow, is one of the nation’s most acclaimed journalists. In The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, Wilkerson tells the epic story of the Great Migration. Due to Jim Crow segregation and incessant racial violence, nearly six million African Americans migrated from the South to other regions of the United States. Wilkerson focuses on the lives of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster. After making the great move north, all three managed to live extraordinary lives despite racial hardships and oppression.

6. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones (2018)

Martha S. Jones, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history, examines the lives and impact of pre-Civil War African Americans who fought for birthright citizenship. These Black activists, who were at the forefront of the struggle for equality, descended on legislatures and courthouses at a time when there were calls to return freed slaves to Africa. Through legal research, strategic alliances, and eloquent arguments, these activists insisted that American Blacks were entitled to the full rights of citizenship by virtue of being born American. Using archival and other research, Jones, who is an historian and an attorney, depicts how these formerly enslaved people understood the law and worked with allies to transform America.

7. The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction and a MacArthur Fellowship, stirred America almost a decade ago with his piece in the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” In his debut novel, The Water Dancer, he writes a first-person narrative rooted in speculative fiction. The protagonist, Hiram Walker, has a precise memory, yet his recollection of his mother is nonexistent. Born into slavery, Walker imagines an existence free from plantation life. Though he manages to escape to the North, Walker understandably still yearns for reunification with his enslaved family. The Water Dancer features supernatural powers to recover collective memory, while offering an alternate history for African Americans who have experienced the generational trauma of slavery.

8. The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. by Peniel E. Joseph (2020)

Peniel E. Joseph, a historian who has won the Benjamin L. Hooks National Book Award, specializes in Black Power Studies. With The Sword and the Shield, Joseph offers a deeper exploration of the philosophies and leadership styles of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Though those two iconic leaders are often juxtaposed for their divergent approaches to progress, toward the end of their lives their views evolved and converged. Before Malcolm X’s assassination, his visit to Mecca transformed the way he interpreted America’s race relations. Prior to King’s assassination, he was growing more radical with his criticisms of the Vietnam War. Joseph’s dual biography of these men interrogates how black power and civil rights shifted the movement and the men who led it.

9. 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021)

Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award winner Nikole Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project and published it, to great acclaim, in The New York Times. Unapologetically, The 1619 Project asserts how free blacks and enslaved persons were essential to America’s foundational principle of democracy. The 1619 Project stirred controversy among some scholars who questioned aspects of its take on America’s origins, but it also forced a new reckoning with the role of race in the nation’s founding. In the book, various contributors—such as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Jesmyn Ward, Trymaine Lee, and Ibram X. Kendi—discuss race, dispossession, inheritance, and progress in America. Featuring, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, each piece can stand alone in its completeness, though every text builds on the last. The 1619 Project ‘s latest accolade: it is now a series on Hulu.

10. You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston (2022)

Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, an acclaimed writer in her own time, who won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction and the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, has only grown in stature since her death. In this new book, published posthumously, editors Genevieve West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have culled a superb collection of Hurston’s writings during the Harlem Renaissance and the early days of school integration. In these beautifully written essays, Hurston confronts not only racism, but sexism. She also probes how White supremacy prevents the full realization of Black humanity and obscures the rich Black contribution to American culture, including language, medicine, and religion.

Kimberly Fain is an attorney, and teaches African American literature at Texas Southern University. She has three published books: African American Literature Anthology: Slavery, Liberation and Resistance, 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