Fans pick 100 books like The Hidden Wound

I’ve known Phil Yancey as an author-friend for many years. But I’d never heard his personal story in such a poignant, powerful way as this memoir. Yancey grew up in the racist south, absorbing the common prejudices and racist attitudes that permeated the culture, even his religious teaching. But then he worked one summer with Dr. Cherry, a Black scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Says Philip: “Here was the smartest man I’d ever met, and it just blew away all the categories I’d been taught”—especially the lie that blacks are innately inferior. From that point on, Philip discovered what I discovered in my life journey—relationships with people different than you enriches your life. Each person, each culture, has gifts to share.

As a white college student, Chris Rice volunteered at Voice of Calvary Ministries in Jackson, MS, where he met Spencer Perkins, son of African American civil rights activist and elder statesman, John Perkins. Chris and Spencer began a lifelong friendship and partnership. My husband and I got to know both Chris and Spencer as our paths crossed in developing Christian community and relationships across racial boundaries. As Chris so poignantly writes in this book, cross-racial relationships are not always easy and take a lot of grace—but are 100% worth it. This book became one of my important books about grace in relationships as I worked on my series—so grateful!

My husband and I got to know Brenda Salter McNeil when we were members of the same multi-cultural church. Before she ever wrote this book, we knew her as a reconciler with a passion for racial justice—especially in the churches. In this book, she invites all of us—white, black, brown, yellow—to the table for honest and passionate conversations about the reconciling nature of the gospel. When things got tough and we struggled with some church issues, Brenda was more than encouraging and supportive—not with easy answers, but with the solid foundation of love between brothers and sisters of faith.

I didn’t know Rachel Held Evans personally, though I did meet her at one of the “Why Christian?” conferences she co-hosted with Nadia Bolz-Weber. But Rachel, who grew up in a white conservative culture like I did, boldly gave me permission to struggle with my faith, to dare to doubt cultural overlays on the basic truths of the gospel. This book—only partially completed when she died suddenly a couple years ago but finished from her various blogs and other writings by author-friend, Jeff Chu—continues to remind me that “wholehearted faith” is to “love God with my whole being and to love my neighbor as myself.” The two greatest commandments. It’s as simple—and as difficult—as that.

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.

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. 

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.

Griffin’s account of his journey through the Deep South as a white man disguised to look Black, originally published in 1960, has stood the test of time because it reveals Griffin’s keen insight into a society riddled with racism. Griffin’s humanity shines through in his descriptions of his encounters with people of all races. He encounters ignorance, cruelty, and threats, but also kindness. His perspective from both sides of the color line reveals the desperate need for the change that would soon come during the Civil Rights movement.

I know the words poignant and Shakespearean are almost cliché when describing stories, but I say, "If the cliché fits, use it."

I love good vs. evil stories, especially if they're set in the South. This one delivers. Forbidden love in the 1950's Jim Crow South is fertile soil for missteps and trouble. During a summer visit to her grandmother's, Catherine's naiveté about the way things were in the South back then made me anxious for her and Jimmy. Their mixed-race attraction for each other was doomed from the start. Part romance, part thriller, I found the suspense in this book powerful.

The Confederacy was consistent throughout most of the war that Black men could not be recruited to serve in the army as soldiers. This was a war to preserve slavery and white supremacy and Black enlisted men would have undermined the very justification for secession and the creation of a new nation. As the war entered its fourth year, however, more and more people realized that this policy was no longer tenable. Historian Bruce Levine offers a thorough analysis of the very public and bitterly divisive debate that took place throughout the Confederacy in 1864 over whether slaves could be recruited as soldiers. Confederates debated this subject in the capital of Richmond, in the army, and in countless newspapers. The question was clear: Should the Confederacy recruit Black men as a way to avoid defeat? That it took the Confederate government until mid-March 1865 to finally approve slave enlistment—much too… show more.