Beloved, you must also educate yourselves about black life and culture. Racial literacy is as necessary as it is undervalued.
What should you read? I always start with James Baldwin, the most ruthlessly honest analyst of white innocence yet to pick up a pen. Baldwin was a boy preacher, and though he outgrew the rituals and theology that hemmed in the very souls religion meant to free, he never left the pulpit. His words drip with the searing eloquence of an evangelist of race determined to get to the brutal bottom of America’s original sin. Baldwin married the gospel fervor of Jonathan Edwards to the literary style of Henry James, most notably in The Fire Next Time.
Beloved, you should read books about slavery that prove it was far more varied and complicated than once believed, including Ira Berlin’s incisive history of slavery before cotton became king in Many Thousands Gone; Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom, which explores the fate of enslaved women; and books like Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage, which probes the relationships between black and white women. The novels The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, about a black family that owned enslaved blacks in the antebellum south, and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, about a newly freed slave who hops aboard a slave ship, give color and texture to slavery. Toni Morrison’s epic novel Beloved lyrically probes the aftereffects of enslavement on the minds and souls of black folk. Her Playing in the Dark is a slim classic that brilliantly probes the white literary imagination and how it silences and distorts the dark agency from which it derives its meaning.
Slavery was ensconced in politics, intertwined with the economy, and thus you need to know impressive works like Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet, Manisha Sinha’s The Counterrevolution of Slavery, Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, and Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden offers a haunting glimpse into what enslaved, and enslaving, people in the Atlantic world made of death. Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering does for the Civil War what Brown does for slavery. The Civil War was, centrally, the infernal contest of white regions over black flesh and its future in America, which you’ll discover when you tackle James McPherson’s fiercely elegant Battle Cry of Freedom. You should read about what went on after the Civil War, especially classics like W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction. And you should ride the epic sweep of black migration along with Isabel Wilkerson in her achingly brilliant The Warmth of Other Suns.
Beloved, take in as much as you can about the modern civil rights movement, glimpsed in stellar works like Aldon Morris’ Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s Voices of Freedom, the book based on Hampton’s monumental documentary television series Eyes on the Prize, which you should make every effort to see. Or you can make your way through Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, in Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge—or the single-volume summary America in the King Years—and David Garrow’s exhaustive and illuminating study of King, Bearing the Cross, or Diane McWhorter’s riveting account of the movement’s impact on white families in Birmingham, including her own, in Carry Me Home. Gilbert King’s heartbreaking Devil in the Grove shines a light on Jim Crow as he probes the case of four young black men accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl in Florida and the valiant defense they got from future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. You should also read Barbara Ransby’s moving portrait of the great organizer and activist, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; Kay Mills’ engrossing study of freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, This Little Light of Mine; and In Struggle, Clayborne Carson’s compelling study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Grapple with the black freedom struggle, too, especially the impact of black nationalism’s most influential leader, Malcolm X, explored in Manning Marable’s magnum opus Malcolm X. Peniel Joseph’s seminal Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour invites us to understand the rich sweep of the black power movement, as does his penetrating study of the movement’s most iconic leader, Stokely Carmichael, in his biography Stokely. To understand how the issue of police brutality inspired social revolution in the seventies, please read Black against Empire, a comprehensive study of the history and politics of the Black Panthers by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Jr. The struggle of black working class folk is captured in Robin Kelley’s landmark Race Rebels. The effort to embrace the intersections of gender, class, sexuality, and feminist politics is portrayed in a series of pioneering books, including Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Barbara Smith’s The Truth That Never Hurts, bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman?, Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory and, along with co-author Andrea Ritchie, Say Her Name, and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought.