The best history books for Black History Month: check out my favorites!
In a past life, I went to graduate school for history. Seriously. I studied for a whole masters degree and most of a PhD. Sometimes, I look at my kids scream-wrestling over individual Cheerios and think, “I went to grad school for this?” So this week, I’m going to draw on my expertise and education in the field of African American history. I’m recommending my favorites – the best history books for Black History Month.
I’ve separated these into two categories: pop history and academic history. Because all these books are great, but someone looking for an easy evening read should pass on Dudziak. Don’t get me wrong: they’re all well-written and researched, or I wouldn’t mention them at all. It’s just that some are way more obvious responses to the work of other historians. As a recovered former academic historian, I know that historiography can get mad boring sometimes.
Pop History
Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
“While black southern laborers, preachers, and college students stood poised on the edge of history (destined to be regarded, for the most part, as bit players in an unfolding historical drama; character actors overwhelmed by the glamorous star power and transcendent appeal of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy), participants in the black freedom struggle reinvented themselves as political figures, cultural doyens, magazine editors, and, at times, reform-minded civil rights activists.”
Peniel Joseph’s masterpiece Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour is the seminal history of the Black folks your school never rolled out in February. More textbook than tome, this book takes familiar and unfamiliar leaders from “the Black freedom struggle” (a term I’ve also personally adopted) and places them all within context. This has the result of showing their often uneasy relationship with the more traditional “civil rights movement.” Joseph’s edited essay anthology, The Black Power Movement, is another must-read, but expensive to buy. Check it out from your local library system instead.
Unless you were raised within the Black Panther Party or have a degree in African American history, you need to learn this history. I recommend this book for everyone. Full stop, no hesitations. Buy it now.
Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class
I planned to open this mini-review with a gentle joke about Graham. But in the middle of writing this, I learned he died last week. Ouch. Rest in power, Mr. Graham.
This book is a fascinating – and kind of rare – look at the original Black bourgeoisie. You can tell I wasn’t born among them: reading this book was definitely the first time I’d ever heard of Jack and Jill, The Links, Boule or Black Martha’s Vineyard. Paper bags tests, sure. The importance of the Divine Nine? Absolutely; Howard is in my hometown. But a lot of this stuff was Greek to me.
I recommend this book to anyone else interested in pulling back the curtain to learn about the Black elite.
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
This book is really long (like almost 1000 pages long), but I’ve put it in the pop history category. Why? Because its narrative structure – straightforward biography – makes it crazy accessible and super easy to read. Historian Manning Marable made writing this book his life’s work; it finally came off the presses right around the time of his death. As a result, it is supremely detailed and engaging.
Too long for you? You can always re read The Autobiography of Malcolm X online for free.
I recommend this for people who want to take a deep dive into the incredible life of Malcolm X, and has time on their hands.
Burt Solomon, The Washington Century: Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation’s Capital
“The ugliness and beauty of the nation’s capital were nothing more, it seemed clear, than a mirror of what the nation had become.”
This book is Exhibit A that Black history is everybody’s history. Solomon explores the massive social, economic and political changes in 20th century Washington, D.C.. But he does this through the stories of three different families: the rags-to-riches real estate mogul Cafritzes, the Democratic politico Boggses, and the activist Hobsons. Each chapter is named for the president whose terms spans the same years, and goes from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.
Every book on this list is good, but this one is definitely the most fun to read. I recommend this book to anyone who loves (or deeply hates) the nation’s capital city, and to political junkies like me.
Academic History
Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, Slavery in New York
“For nearly three hundred years, slavery was an intimate part of the lives of all New Yorkers, black and white, insinuating it self into every nook and cranny of New York’s history. For portions of the 17th and 18th centuries, New York City has the largest urban slave population in mainland North America, with more slaves than any other city on the continent.”
Normally when Americans think about slavery, we recall images of 19th century plantation life in the South, with its rows of slave cabins and cotton; when we think about free Blacks, our minds go to Charleston or New Orleans Creoles. This collection of essays takes us back earlier and further north than we’re typically accustomed. New York passed the Gradual Emancipation Law in 1799, though individuals remained enslaved there until the 1850s. The large number of free Blacks in the crowded metropolis made it easier for African Americans to shape and participate in the culture of colonial New York. In eleven independent chapters, this book explores the differences between Dutch and British slavery, the effects of the American Revolution on Black New York, and Black life in freedom, including Black abolitionists.
Of all the books on this list, this one is the easiest to pick up and put back down. I highly recommend it to native and adopted New Yorkers, Hamilton mega-fans, and anyone curious about slavery outside the British American South.
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
On the very first page of her introduction, Mary Dudziak makes her thesis as loud and clear as a Wayans MESSAGE: “Because the United States was the presumptive leader of the free world, racism in the nation was a matter of international concern. How could American democracy be a beacon during the Cold War, and a model for those struggling against Soviet oppression, if the United States itself practice brutal discrimination against minorities within its own borders?”
She convincingly makes the argument that many of the post-WWII gains made by African Americans were the result of an international pressure campaign. This campaign was designed to embarrass the U.S. government into extending human rights to Black citizens as part of the war against communism. Activists intentionally invited press to events they predicted might erupt in white supremacist violence. This ensured that newsreels of the brutality could be broadcast internationally. To combat this bad press(!) and curry favor with newly independent African and Asian nations, the government took concrete action.
The book has 54 pages of footnotes, but is just as rich with anecdotes that draw in the reader. I highly recommend this for nerds with an interest in the Cold War.
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
“[A]fter disenfranchisement of black men, black women became diplomats to the white community, just as southern progressivism flowered. Whites designed their progressive programs to exclude African Americans, but black women built social service and civic structures that rested some recognition and Meeker services from the expanding welfare state. Ironically, as black men were forced from the political, the political underwent a redefinition, opening new space for black women. Contact between black and white women increased, and woman suffrage became an issue that forced activist white women to examine their racial ideology.”
This was one of the first books to blow me away in graduate school. Gilmore uses post-Reconstruction North Carolina as a lens to examine the ways that Black women built power in a political system that actively disfranchised Black male voters. Her focus on the Black middle class paints a broader picture of life in the Jim Crow South than the one commonly presented in media.
This book is a dense read, but it’s worth it. Skip the historiography and you’ll finish it faster. Recommended for women activists who want to strengthen their bonds with their predecessors.
Do you have any favorite Black history books? Drop their titles in the comments below!
A malcontent with a heart of gold, Tierra is a first-year medical student, former high school teacher and history PhD candidate, plus mom to four of Bebe’s baddest kids. She curses a lot. Tierra is a DC native but lives in southwest Michigan and will happily exchange writing (hers) for cash (yours).
