Announcing...
The 2024 Short List
Emilie Boone | Joan L. Bryant | Orisanmi Burton | Clay Cane |
Marlene L. Daut | Jonathan Eig | Grace Elizabeth Hale | Victor Luckerson |
Matthew D. Morrison | Amrita Chakrabarti Myers |
Dylan C. Penningroth | Ashley Robertson Preston |
Barbara D. Savage | Chad L. Williams
The following fourteen books were chosen from 118 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. These books also represent the Museum’s core belief that understanding the history of African Americans is integral to understanding our collective American history.
A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography
Emilie Boone
While James Van Der Zee is widely known and praised for his studio portraits from the Harlem Renaissance era, much of the diversity and expansive reach of his work has been overlooked. From the major role his studio played for decades photographing ordinary people and events in the Harlem community to the inclusion of his photographs in the landmark Harlem on My Mind exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, Van Der Zee was a foundational Black photographer whose work illustrates the shifting ways photography serves as a constitutive force within Black life.
In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the 20th century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora.
Published by Duke University
I want to read more books like this. Browse Art/Literative/Music and
20th Century History in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books.
Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-Century America
Joan L. Bryant
Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness.
Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long 19th century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism.
Published by Oxford University Press
I want to read more books like this. Browse 19th Century History and
Social Science/Social Commentary in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Apple Books.
Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Orisanmi Burton
A radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons. Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.
Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.
Published by University of California Press
I want to read more books like this. Browse Black Lives Matter/Policing and
2oth Century History in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump
Clay Cane
Part history and part cultural analysis, The Grift chronicles the nuanced history of Black Republicans. Clay Cane lays out how Black Republicanism has been mangled by opportunists who are apologists for racism.
After the Civil War, the pillars of Black Republicanism were a balanced critique of both political parties, civil rights for all Americans, reinventing an economy based on exploitation, and, most importantly, building thriving Black communities. How did Black Republicanism devolve from revolutionaries like Frederick Douglass to the puppets in the Trump era?
Published by Sourcebooks
I want to read more books like this. Browse Law/Politics and
Social Science/Social Commentary in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books.
Awakening the Ashes:
An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
Marlene L. Daut
In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known 18th- and 19th-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
Published by University of North Carolina Press
I want to read more books like this. Browse African Diaspora and/or Slavery/Abolition in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon. Bookshop. Apple Books.
King: A Life
Jonathan Eig
Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.
In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I want to read more books like this. Browse Biography and/or Civil Rights in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning
Grace Elizabeth Hale
Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt.
Years later, as a rising scholar of white supremacy, Hale revisited the story about her grandfather and Versie Johnson, the man who died in his custody. The more she learned about what had happened that day, the less sense she could make of her family's version of events. With the support of a Carnegie fellowship, she immersed herself in the investigation. What she discovered would upend everything she thought she knew about her family, the tragedy, and this haunted strip of the South—because Johnson's death, she found, was actually a lynching. But guilt did not lie with a faceless mob.
A story of obsession, injustice, and the ties that bind, In the Pines casts an unsparing eye over this intimate terrain, driven by a deep desire to set straight the historical record and to understand and subvert white racism, along with its structures, costs, and consequences—and the lies that sustain it.
Published by Little, Brown & Compan
I want to read more books like this. Browse Black Lives Matter/Policing and/or Memories/Family Histories in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street
Victor Luckerson
When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history.
Victor Luckerson tells the true story behind a potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.
Published by Penquin Random House
I want to read more books like this. Explore Civil Rights Era and Memoirs/Family Histories in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
Black Sound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States
Matthew D. Morrison
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry. Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the 20th century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Published by University of California Press
I want to read more books like this. Explore Art/Literature/Music in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers
Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate.
This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted.
What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point.
Published by University of North Carolina Press
I want to read more books like this. Explore Slavery/Abolition and Biographies in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
Dylan C. Penningroth
The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery.
Published by Liveright Publishing
I want to read more books like this. Explore Civil Rights Era and Law/Politics in our library
Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist
Ashley Robertson Preston
Broadening the familiar view of Bethune as an advocate for racial and gender equality within the United States, Ashley Preston argues that Bethune consistently sought to unify African descendants around the world with her writings, through travel, and as an advisor.
Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist provides a fuller, more accurate understanding of Bethune’s work, illustrating the perspective and activism behind Bethune’s much-quoted words: “For I am my mother’s daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.”
Published by University Press of Florida
I want to read more books like this. Explore Biography and African Diaspora in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books
Merz Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar
Barbara D. Savage
A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler. This book revives and critiques Tate's prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa.
Barbara Savage's lucid and skilled rendering of Tate's story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate's life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women's history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.
Published by Yale University Press
I want to read more books like this. Explore Biographies in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books.
The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War
Chad L. Williams
When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to “close ranks” and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished.
In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois’s failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois’s largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I want to read more books like this. Peruse 20th Century History in our library
I want to read this book. Amazon, Bookshop, Apple Books.
Design for the 2024 Shortlist page was inspired by the New York Times
100 Best Books of the 21st Century