100 books like Killers of the Dream

In this academic work, Hale explores what she terms as “spectacle lynchings” and the shift from private to public violence. Hale considers how newspapers, photographs, and radio broadcasts brought news of these brutal scenes to an audience of tens of thousands. Through her careful examination, Hale lays out how the media shaped a national narrative that is relevant for both understanding conversations about racial violence and for considering how mass media shapes our current perspectives.

I think this novel did more to open white minds to the needless social harm of racism than any other book. It’s almost unparalleled success in reaching American readers of all ages, in my view, places it at or very near the top of the list of great American fiction.

Though not Harper Lee’s intent, her literary and commercial blockbuster remains an enduring tutorial for writers like me:  writers preoccupied with storytelling and the voices telling it. Sometimes, after a long writing session, I read a random chapter of Mockingbird to relax and to keep myself modest.

Not for the faint of heart, this collection of lynching images bears witness to the extreme violence used to enforce segregation. Leon Litwack’s introduction contextualizes these displays as violence aimed to reinforce white supremacy and leads the reader through the reality of these events and their lasting consequences on race relations. The photographs are irrefutable evidence of how such events must be recorded to ensure they never again occur. Despite the horror of the images within, this book will forever change your understanding of our past.

In this tract, Wells became the first person, Black or white, to distribute a systematically researched explanation for the rise in lynchings in the South during the late nineteenth century. Wells’s investigation into lynchings across the South countered the image perpetuated by the media that Black males possessed an uncontrolled sexual desire for white women. Instead, Wells noted that lynchings were a form of terrorism; acts of racial violence intended to maintain white economic, social, and political power. It was a gutsy move for a young, southern, Black woman, and it resulted in her being exiled from the South for fear of her life. The truths she exposed resonated with the Civil Rights Movement and reverberate in modern times as we consider race, Black masculinity, police authority, and legal equality.

Two people who worked for Wendell Berry’s family when he was a child had a profound effect on his life—“Aunt Georgie” Ashby and Nick Watkins. With the simplicity of their lives birthing profound wisdom, Berry credits them for helping to expose the hidden wound of racism and putting his feet on a path to reject the deeply ingrained racism of his youth. The result is a deeply thoughtful book of reflections and wisdom on the cancer that infects our society and what we must do to lance and heal it—if we will. A “must read” on your bookshelf.

Throughout the 1960s, NASA tried in vain to lure Black engineers to its Southern Centers.

The agency had its excuses, but as I began to talk to NASA’s Black pioneers, I began hearing vivid descriptions of the terror that kept their friends from going to work with them at NASA. This thought-provoking examination of one of the darkest chapters in American history helps lay out a source of their reticence.

The book delves deep into the socio-political, racial, and cultural factors that led to the widespread practice of lynching. Brundage skillfully portrays the complex web of prejudice, fear, and power dynamics that fueled this brutal form of violence. Through his detailed analysis, we gain a chilling picture and the backstory of what kept NASA so White.

Growing up in the South and having a penchant for writing about racial justice, genealogy, travel, truth-telling, and more, this book is among the top ones on my favorite list. The South is more complicated than many think. Along with the racists and bigots, there are plenty of really smart people who are progressive and thoughtful. Good writers sprout like the wild primroses in Alabama. I liked how Perry stirs together history with her travels and her own dear ancestors.

Perry starts her explorations with Harper’s Ferry, which brought back my vivid memories of its spectacular scenery. It still holds onto John Brown, but there is so much more, which she explains. There are plenty of nuanced stories and surprises as she travels across state after state. 

This slim volume packs a mean punch. Following the secession of the seven Deep Southern states in 1860-61, commissioners were sent out to the remaining uncommitted slaveholding states to convince their leaders of the necessity of joining the new Confederate States of America. While the arguments of these secession commissioners included constitutional arguments in favor of secession, they relied even more so on emotional pleas that framed the election of the nation’s first Republican president as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Their speeches were laced with horrific images of emancipation and a region plunged into racial violence. Charles Dew offers a compelling argument that highlights the importance of slavery and race in the outbreak of war.

I only recently discovered the work of Anna J. Cooper, but I find myself reading and thinking about and with her a lot. She’s not an obvious philosophical love for me in that she never writes about LGBTQIA life and does write about men and women from a relatively conservative, Christian, cis, and straight point of view. However, Cooper gives voice to and insight into the struggles of Black women, and her work helps me, as someone who is both racialized as white and an immigrant to the US, perceive and feel important dimensions of the reality in which I now live.

Thus, in her writings about the things she knows about, I find a friend and a colleague as I’m trying to think about intersectional issues that go beyond the life I know first-personally.

Anna Julia Cooper is one of the nineteen and twentieth American philosophers I find most exciting.

Her book, A Voice from the South, is the first feminist book to introduce the idea of intersectionality! She spent her very long lifetime writing about education, women’s rights, racism, and she has a fascinating correspondence with the intellectuals of her time, including W.E.B Dubois.

But until recently getting hold of her writings wasn’t terribly easy, unless you were willing to read online, or had access to a good academic library.

This beautiful and cheap edition is a godsend and everyone should buy it.