100 books like Mrs. Dred Scott

This is a book that inspired me as a historian and in my approach to activism. Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker excavates the activist’s life, placing the reader at the nexus of some of the most important moments in civil rights history. Ella Baker’s life also provides a blueprint for local activism and group-centered leadership. It’s a compelling story of how Ella Baker became a mentor, inspiring, listening to, and supporting local activists. 

This brilliant, best-selling book turned award-winning documentary is so fantastic for unraveling a revisionist history of the “tired old lady who wouldn’t move to the back of the bus.”

Not unlike the way I show how Dr. King’s memory has been sanitized and defanged, Theoharis shows how Parks’ memory has been voided of her long history of radical activism, and her unyielding pursuit of racial and social justice.

I thought about this book a lot as I was writing my chapter on the hidden Black women, the “sheroes” of the Civil Rights Movement who present-day Black feminist activists are resurrecting in public consciousness.

I’ve taught Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun many times in my university courses. That play transformed African American theater in the Civil Rights era and marked a phenomenal debut for its 29-year-old writer. In her too-short life (she died a few years later from pancreatic cancer), Hansberry built an extraordinary life as a writer, intellectual, and political activist. This biography tells that rich, remarkable story.

Benjamin’s Half in Shadow is an excellent exploration of the life of Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006), a pioneering scholar of black women’s literature. Fearing it could damage her career in the academy, McKay declined to be caricatured as an older, divorced, black single mother of two children. So, she hid this from all her academic colleagues and friends, including her closest ones. The driving force of Benjamin’s book is trying to make sense of the private life and professional motivations of McKay’s choice to live her life “half in shadow.” Benjamin suggests that black women in the academy face similar pressures to achieve in and conform to predominantly white spaces in ways that do not easily allow them to bring their entire selves into the light.

I’ve long been fascinated with Walker’s life and work. Ten years ago, I devoted a chapter of my dissertation to Walker and now I’m working with TED-ED on an animated video and related teaching materials about the man whom Frederick Douglass himself cited as the progenitor of the radical abolitionist movement.

When teaching African-American Literature courses, I’ve found Walker’s Appeal to be an especially effective entry point for Black students who are tired of stories of slavery and Black debasement. Walker, as a freeborn Black man from the slaveholding south (and later Boston), offers a different vision: of impressive erudition and entrepreneurship, of Pan-African pride and militant resistance.

This novel, told from a slave woman’s perspective, illuminates the time of maximal oppression in the slave colony of Jamaica, where White men sexually and physically abused enslaved Black women at whim. Lilith, the main character, came alive to me as her rage and despair grew with the multiple attacks on her body and spirit. 

It took me back to the anguish I felt discovering the journals of Thomas Thistlewood and his chronicling of close to 4,000 acts of rape carried out on his female Black slaves. When I visited Jamaica for the first time, I included Westmorland Parish as a stop. It was there that Thistlewood perpetrated his atrocities – an appalling example of the conditions under which enslaved women and girls lived during this period. 

The United States today still bears the scars of our long and terrible history of slavery. In this new and wonderfully thoughtful history of ancient Greek slavery, Sarah Forsdyke brings us face-to-face with the lived experience of a very different, but also harrowing, history of human bondage. Forsdyke delves into the question of how slaves lived and worked, how they resisted their oppression, and how the fact of slavery defined Greek society and economy. The intertwined development of a market economy, a citizen-centered democracy, and the systematic extraction of labor from unfree people is a stark reminder that our American story, although in many ways distinctive, was not unique. 

Voices of the Enslaved is a beautifully written and masterfully researched book (also award-winning) on the French period in colonial Louisiana. White traces the fleeting appearances of enslaved Africans in Louisiana court records to illuminate how they were able to achieve legal recognition where their enslavers tried to give them none. Out of the many fragments of legal documents, White creates a collage of Black lives in French Louisiana that really illuminates the Black contributions to the region.

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.

Eugene Genovese was the most brilliant of a talented generation of scholars whose studies of New World slavery have since been largely deposed by a far more simplistic, black-and-white (pun intended) version of the same. 

Genovese’s magnum opus, Roll, Jordan, Roll, offers an unsparing view of a reality in which neither master nor slave “could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other,” an especially intimate form of class rule which struck a compelling contrast to the anonymity of the wage nexus increasingly prevalent in the Northern states. 

These dialectics played out in a continual, if asymmetric, power struggle at the heart of plantation life, where the economy could not be separated out from racial, sexual, religious, and ideological experience, again, in stark contrast to the liberal division of social life into autonomous spheres of existence.