The best books about the strength it takes to be Black in America

This was a book I first read nearly fifty years ago after my childhood friend Nate Harrington taught me to read while we were in prison together at 18 and 19 years old. As part of our commitment to helping each other return to our communities as an asset and not a liability, the men in prison taught each other political education classes, which included reading key texts like Malcolm X’s autobiography.

This book gave me an indication that I could do something different with my life. That moment occurred when it was revealed that Malcolm was known as “Detroit Red” on the streets of New York City–but when he went to prison and found a true education, he also embraced a new identity and new way of life. He died as Malcolm. His journey indicated that I could make a transition, too. It also helped me recognize that If I didn’t like the past, I had to change my current practice. 

The restorative justice movement didn’t start until after I got out of prison. We were mandated not to contact victims of our crimes. No one can think clearly when they’re under the threat of force and fear, so it took me many years to find true remorse.

When I was ready to write to the victims of my crime, as I reflected on my life while writing my book, I relied on Danielle’s book and Danielle’s personal guidance. She helped me see where I was minimizing or in denial, and I crafted my letter of repair for three weeks.

Her book helped me hold two ideas as true at the same time: I was participating in an act of harm when I was part of the group that robbed a liquor store and caused the man behind the counter to die, and I had to own that I was a part of that violence and harm, and I hold that alongside the truth that I was also living under a racist system in a country that criminalized me as a child and allowed me no other identity but a thug.

I met Susan at the beginning of her career. Even that first day, seeing her give a talk in the living room of the very first home she established for women coming out of prison, I thought she was so significant as a person. I knew she was a leader and found her the first grant funding for her housing and support project, A New Way of Life.

I witnessed the growth that she writes about in her autobiography, how she found purpose in helping others after she spent years losing herself in addiction and prison after too many personal tragedies to count. Her story is one of becoming a comrade in the fight to restore full civil and human rights to previously incarcerated people.

Ms. Burton is not just the title of the book; it’s what other people younger than me call her. She inspires them, and it reflects who she has become. Most of my friends and comrades are women. I think they’re strong. She didn’t let anyone push her off the field, and her work to tell her own life story inspired me to write my book. 

Fanon’s analysis of how Black people in colonized Africa and in the United States were one oppressed people was part of my political education. This book was formative to my politics, which are rooted in Fanon’s combination of Marxism and resistance to racial oppression.

Reading Fanon allowed me to accept my culture and who I was as a Black person. I started reflecting on assimilation and how we changed our hair and skin to look more acceptable to white people. He was also my friend Nate’s favorite author.

After Nate got out of prison, he became an attorney and director of prisoner legal services at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. There’s a memorial to him there still, in the jail lobby, and Fanon’s book is in there.

I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression Black people live under in the United States.

She affirmed what I had suspected: that incarceration continues the enslavement of Black people. I called a colleague and said, this book will have more impact than I could making speeches to a thousand people at a time, a hundred times a year.

I hustled to take her on a tour of  Black neighborhoods so they could hear her analysis and she could hear how her book resonated with authentic voices from the Black community.