And then...

2023 Short List

The following fourteen books were chosen from 90 eligible submissions. Books are judged based on their scholarship and accessibility, with an eye toward identifying exceptional works that spark dialogue within and across social and racial groups. We also value books that reflect the core values of the Museum.

Spoken Word: A Cultural History
Joshua Bennett, Alfred A. Knopf

Bennett’s book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.

Stayed On Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey
Dan Berger, Basic Books

Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. A moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
Margaret Burnham, W.W. Norton & Company

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law? Margaret A. Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960.

The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom
Thulani Davis, Duke University Press

Davis provides a rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
Kerri K. Greenidge, Liveright

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family. Greenidge presents a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.

Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement
Irvin J. Hunt, University of North Carolina Press

From a remarkably diverse archive, Hunt extrapolates three new ways to describe the time of a movement: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a simultaneity, a kind of all-at-once-ness. These temporalities reflect how a people maneuvered the law, reappropriated property, built autonomous communities, and fundamentally reimagined what a movement can be.

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik
Winston James, Columbia University Press

Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

The Black Fives: The Epic Story of Basketball's Forgotten Era
Claude Johnson, Abrams Books

From the invention of the game in 1891 to the racial integration of all-White professional leagues in the 1950s, dozens of teams -- then often called "fives" -- of African American players were founded and flourished. But this era, known as the Black Fives Era, has been forgotten, overlooked, unacknowledged, and squashed. Claude Johnson has made it his mission to change that.

White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Exclusion to Exploitation
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, University of Minnesota Press

White Burgers, Black Cash traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities. Deeply researched, compellingly told, and brimming with surprising details, this book reveals the inequalities embedded in America’s popular national food tradition.

Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon
Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, University of Illinois Press

Freeman Marshall explores Hurston’s popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Ain’t I an Anthropologist is a long-awaited reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life.

Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA
Theresa Runstedtler, Hachette Book Group

A vital narrative history of 1970s pro basketball, and the Black players who shaped the NBA against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power.

Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad
Miriam Thaggert, University of Illinois Press

Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
Linda Villarosa, Doubleday

The United States has the most advance medical technology in the world an spends more on health care than any other country, yet the health outcomes of Black Americans are by several measures on par with those of people living in far poorer nations. In Under the Skin, award-winning journalist Linda Villarosa explains how racism -- not race -- drives these numbers, drawing on gripping human stories and meticulous research to create a portrait of Black American lives shaped by inequality.

I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction
Kidada E. Williams, Bloomsbury Publishing

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives.