Books similar like If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday

We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

A radical reframing of the past and present of Black resistance—both nonviolent and violent—to white supremacy.

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Mart…

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Negroes with Guns

First published in 1962, Negroes with Guns is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered …

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Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

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The Music of Black Americans: A History

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Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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Lady Sings the Blues

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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

In celebration of its highly anticipated Broadway revival, Ntozake Shange’s classic, award-winning play centering the wide-ranging experiences of Black women, now with introductions by two-time Nation…

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Nigger

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night..."

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White Teeth

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevo…

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that…

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The Mis-Education of the Negro

The Mis-Education of the Negro is one of the most important books on education ever written. Carter G. Woodson shows us the weakness of Euro-centric based curriculums that fail to include African Amer…

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The Color Purple

Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Puli…

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Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave an…

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W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

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Dust Tracks on a Road

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most compelling and influential author…

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1)

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Here is a book as joyous …

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. Th…

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Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath, Saidiya Hartman illumines the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity. Scenes of …

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Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing

While African Americans managed to emerge from chattel slavery and the oppressive decades that followed with great strength and resiliency, they did not emerge unscathed. Slavery produced centuries of…

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Black Boy

Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming…

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If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday

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