Fans pick 100 books like More Than Freedom

More than a century before Oprah, emancipated African Americans organized their own book clubs. They studied mainly the Western classics but also emerging black writers.

While Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational training, more militant black leaders demanded the right to read the same authors taught in elite white academies: One of their syllabuses included Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar and Sappho. Those poets, said one reader, inspired the "hope [that] the great American epic of the joys and sorrows of our blood and kindred, of those who have gone before us[,] would one day be written."

And that's exactly what happened. A young Ralph Ellison read everything in the segregated branch of the Oklahoma City library; Malcolm X was profoundly affected by Paradise Lost; and Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University.

The story of how this book came to be is almost as interesting as the story it tells. Emerging from a class discussion at the University of Delaware, the Colored Conventions Project developed into an award-winning international digital initiative involving community partners representing a broad range of churches, schools, and other organizations. These collaborative efforts led to an historic conference that led, in turn, to this book, in which various contributors address different aspects of the Colored Conventions Movement, a series of state and national gatherings that took place throughout the nineteenth century to work towards strengthened communities and social reform. These conventions both represented and encouraged the larger community-development project that took place nationally, and it’s a revelation to discover this great foundation of African American activism, a collaborative effort being continued today by the ambitious project this book represents.

This is a fascinating book that deals with one of the central dilemmas in American history—that a nation committed to high ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a republic made up of people from several lands could also be a nation committed to racial oppression and the denial of fundamental rights. It considers citizenship not as noun but as verb—a dynamic process, not just a legal affiliation. Spires gets at the complexity of American life, explaining approaches to citizenship that required savvy improvisation, community formation, and determined commitment to ideals that were violated by the dominant culture at every turn. Spires explores the tensions, the disagreements over directions and methods, that were part of this collective effort, and the concepts of citizenship that emerged from those productive debates. Among a great many other things, readers will learn a lot about African American intellectual life, writing, and… show more.

If you’re interested in nineteenth-century African American activism, then you should read something by someone directly involved in that work. William Still, based in Philadelphia, was involved in a great many social-reform efforts, but he is known today primarily for his work with the Underground Railroad—an institution that was itself a blend of fact and fiction, history and legend. In this book, Still tells the story of a number of individuals who successfully escaped from enslavement, some of them with organized assistance, and others who managed on their own before reaching the networks available to them once they reached Philadelphia and Still’s network of committed antislavery workers.

Since the book is comprised primarily of these many individual stories, and with no discernible organizing principle, this can be a challenging book to read from the first page to the last. But that won’t stop you, and you might find yourself replicating… show more.

Richard Hart, a prominent, civic-minded Springfield lawyer and an exceptionally kind and generous friend, was also an avid local historian who tirelessly examined original sources in search of information about Springfield during Lincoln’s time.

In 1999, he published a seminal article demonstrating that African Americans “were a significant part not only of the town’s life, but of Abraham Lincoln’s life and environment.” He then elaborated on that point in this book, written with the assistance of Bonnie Paull, a retired professor of English.

I dedicated one of my books to Hart, paying tribute to him as the author “who pioneered the way,” showing that Lincoln’s interaction with African American neighbors, friends, clients, and employees in the Illinois capital profoundly shaped his racial egalitarianism.

The stars had to align perfectly for this autobiography to have been written. Born into slavery in the American South, Elizabeth Keckley learned to read and write at a time when laws forbade it. Her skills as a seamstress allowed her to buy her freedom and later become Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker. She also became a close confidant of the First Lady, gaining an unfiltered view of life in the White House during one of the most crucial times in our nation’s history. After Lincoln’s assassination, Keckley published this autobiography and was widely criticized for relaying intimate conversations and private moments she shared with the Lincoln family. In addition, Keckley’s unflinching account of slavery was difficult for many to read. However, this book has endured as one of the best accounts of life as a slave and of the Lincolns’ time in the White House.

Most people don’t know that at one time, slavery existed in every state, not just in the South. This powerful book tells the story of Sojourner Truth’s time in slavery in New York, from her birth in 1797 until she escaped as a young woman in the 1820s. 

Unfortunately, Truth continued to face hardships in freedom, most terribly when her son was sold away from her to Alabama. Fortunately, she fought in court and won so that he was returned.

Truth continued to fight for women’s rights and black civil rights for the rest of her life. In 1864, she even met with Lincoln at the White House.

This might seem like a strange pick, since it’s almost never described in terms of Gothicism.

Douglass’s narrative is essential reading regardless—a compelling narrative and one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature. What makes it Gothic? In Douglass’s world, nothing is what it appears to be, because slavery has corrupted not only institutions but virtually all personal relationships. There are trap doors everywhere and a constant threat of violence.

A century and a half before Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Douglass’s book describes the Gothic horror of everyday life under slavery.

Written at a time when the racist belief that Black authors could not be trusted to write African-American history was still prevalent even in the upper echelons of academia, this deft 1948 portrait of Douglass launched the career of Benjamin Quarles, the pioneering African-American historian whose body of work (including The Negro in the American Revolution and Lincoln and the Negro) transformed thinking about the role African-Americans played in the formation of the United States.

The author and I live near each other and we got to know each other at local writer events. So when I heard that her book won Lee and Low’s New Voices Award, I just had to get Glenda’s book. And I did! She autographed a copy for me which I treasure. This is a tender, powerful, and inspiring picture book. It tells the true story of how Frederick Douglass’s mother would visit him. He was a young child working on a plantation. His mother lived and worked six miles away. At night, she would walk six miles through the dark woods to come to visit Frederick, then head back home before dawn. He knew his mother loved him—it was a love that stretched 12 miles long.