Black Studies from I Cannot Live Without Books

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont More than one million black soldiers served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and… Read more about this item

Enslaved: The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Simcha Jacobovici & Sean Kingsley From the writers behind the acclaimed documentary series Enslaved (starring Samuel L. Jackson), comes a rich and timely narrative of the true global and human scope of the transatlantic slave trade. The trade existed for four-hundred years, during which twelve million people were trafficked, and almost… Read more about this item

To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America by Andrew Baker On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a Black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the… Read more about this item

Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights… Read more about this item

Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration by Edward T. Cotham, Jr. Juneteenth has been touted as a national day celebrating the end of slavery. Observances from coast to coast have turned this event into parts of the national conversation about race, slavery, and how Americans understand, acknowledge, and explain what has been called the national "original sin." But, why Juneteenth? Where did… Read more about this item

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