How We Got Here - A Book List
I won’t wax poetic on this, other than to say it’s a coincidence that I’ve been buried in lots of non-fiction reading about the history of this country and how we got here. This list isn’t exhaustive AT ALL.Â
With that, here’s some reading worth adding to your list.
Some of the highlights below:
In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990, Quintard Taylor
Education of Blacks in the South 1860-1935, James D. Anderson
Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Leon Litwack
Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, Mary Patillo
Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, Larry Tye
The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Tim Tzouliadis
We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, Tommie Shelby
Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey C. Ward
“Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity, Beverly Tatum
The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, Thomas Shapiro
Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs, Deidre Royster
Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union: An Autobiography, Robert Robinson
Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation 1968-98, James Cone
Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class, Karyn Lacy
Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, Paul Tough
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, Tom Burrell
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson
