The best books about the power of memory to heal the trauma of racial violence

I recommend this first book because I believe racial violence won’t stop in our country until we tell the truth about our past. Only by memorializing the accurate stories of racial injustice in our history can we convince good people that white supremacy is alive and strong and destroying our national unity.

In their book, historians Kyle and Roberts reveal the links between the beliefs of the confederacy in the 1850s South and the modern-day massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof who sought out slavery’s descendants and terrorized them anew in the 2015 Charleston massacre.

The murdered churchgoers were elders in the exact church that Denmark Vesey founded back in 1818. His statue and memorial garden is one of those public memorials we are still fighting about.

The story of resistor Denmark Vesey and other freedom fighters like him can lead to solutions for the tragedy of persistent racial violence.

After reading this book, I felt closer to the remarkably courageous Fannie Lou Hamer and better able to talk with others about race and the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.

We cannot promote tolerance and heal racism unless we know each other's life stories and come to care about the same things. In sharing Mrs. Hamer’s life story in great detail, Keisha Blain made me a co-owner of the trauma experienced by this inspirational historical figure.

This book details the mundane and the heroic aspects of one racial justice warrior's life. It describes the beatings, injustice, forced sterilizations, sexual assaults, and other degradations Mrs. Hamer and her fellow racial justice advocates suffered and lived to tell about. They did this so that we could change such injustice and live in a country that lives up to its creed and follows the rule of law.

I learned firsthand specific examples of how the state of Mississippi was a bona fide police state in the 1950s and 1960s and how the effects of state-sanctioned violence linger to this day. Take caution. Because we will repeat what we don’t repair.

This is a big story told through unearthed archives, newspapers, and interviews with politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves.

The Half Has Never Been Told offers first-hand accounts of American history. It invites readers to a reckoning with the violence at the root of American supremacy. I loved reading about the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end—and created a culture that speaks to America’s dreams of freedom.

After reading accounts of the previously silent “other half” of this history, I felt convinced that an integrated national understanding of what actually happened in the Civil War is an evolving development with current implications. And I became more aware that as a nation, we are forever indebted to the patriotism and bravery of the Black heroes and survivors who lived to tell the tale of “the other half”.

History professor and master storyteller Edward Baptist believes that the institution of slavery served as a central organizing principle for the economy and culture of American life from constitutional times all the way up to the Civil War.

What I love about this book is the way it is two disparate things at the same time. It is an epic historical sweep of 200 years of national events and at the same time, it is a series of personal stories that take you inside the life of the enslaved.

Few Americans know the literature of the slave narratives. In the 1930’s writers and social workers, volunteers, and paid government workers fanned out in 15 states across the South to get recorded interviews of the aging Black survivors of the slave trade and slave life in the Plantation South.

I love these first-hand accounts. Because they make clear that it is impossible to deny the horrors of slavery. Especially after reading The Half Has Never Been Told. And I believe if we don’t know about it and know how to talk about it, we cannot reconcile it.

You  will be changed by the details in the stories contained in this book. Empathy can change hearts and heal wounds.

This beautiful story tells the tale of Hiram Walker. Hiram is the fictional biracial slave who escapes his life of slavery on a Virginia plantation and learns to nurture his spiritual gifts to be a Moses to other Freedmen escaping the horrors of slavery.

He is the son of an enslaved woman and the white plantation owner. Such parentage was common during the era of slavery and the slave trade in the U.S. Many plantation owners enslaved, owned, tortured, beat, sold, and traded away their own children.

Through Hiram we see the mystical gifts of the African oral tradition to use memory as a tool to survive. This transmission of African culture occurs through the daily practice of song, prayer, dance, and most importantly, ancestor veneration, through stories, belief, and faith. The oppressive slave owners knew little of the power of these immutable tools.

Hiram describes the mystical power this way: “It was a power that came from the music, that came from the dance. It was a power they could not understand because they could not remember.”

“It was close to a power that flummoxed the scholars and baffled those in power.”

I have always felt it was important to know what questions to ask. The most important question I never knew I needed to know was this: How did human beings survive the multiple horrors of the trauma of slavery and the slave trade, including torture, degradation, and violent family separation?

I am a student of the ways in which the human spirit survives and resists oppression. But here is another social puzzle we should all try to solve. Why do racists selling misinformation and hate in our modern culture seek to vilify and terrorize the heroic survivors of oppression such as immigrants fleeing persecution and Black American unarmed men wrongly arrested, jailed, and sometimes killed just for being Black in America?

It has been almost 2 years since I read The Water Dancer. Since that time, I have read 8 other nonfiction accounts of history in 1800s America. Books about the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass’ life and times, Harriett Tubman, the slave trade, and the thwarting of reconstruction in the U.S.

All of these events and more show up in the story of Hiram Walker. Is The Water Dancer fiction? Or is it Non Fiction? I learned it is both. And that is one of my favorite ways to learn important truths. I learned again, and in a new context, that Memory is Power. This book presents real facts wrapped in compelling stories, well crafted and expertly told.

This is the kind of story, told by master craftsman and creative genius Tanahesi Coates, that makes you put down the book and stare out into space and say “my God”. I did this multiple times while reading The Water Dancer. It made me grateful for the powerful gift of memory.

Winner of the national book award for non-fiction, this magnificent book brings the reader into the heartbreaking, but common occurrence of mother child separation. These separations happened quite frequently during the child trafficking practices of slavery in the United States.

The mother, Rose, provides her daughter, Ashley, with tokens and tools in a hand-crafted sack that she carries with her when she is wrenched from her mother in a slave sale. The truth of Roses’ love and loss reverberates and ripples through several generations of one black American family.

This book made me recall family keepsakes I have not thought about in years. It helped me feel more grateful for those who came before me. I loved how it teaches about women’s ability to make a way out of no way. I felt hopeful and inspired by the triumphs of the black family and all families.

Intergenerational love is a unique kind of love. Such a powerful love can sustain us in the hardest of times.