I ardently began research and writing on Jean-Michel Basquiat in grad school (2004), before his paintings demolished sales records and when he was still somewhat misunderstood and marginalized by perplexed art historians. Since then, his potency and intrigue have blazed a global pop culture inferno. I’ve conducted dozens of interviews, befriended those close to him, memorized his lines, colors, words, and spaces in books and real life, and re-read countless pages. Currently I’m writing and compiling a field guide to his work. All Basquiat publications are imperfect. I hope with sensitivity and intellectual intent, fans can move through their initial impressions to better understand his meaningful motives, inclinations, and artwork.
No single book on my list is the perfect gateway to Basquiat, but taken as a group, you have a strong primer.
This recommendation includes abundant personal memories, photos, ephemera and artworks from the private collection of Jean-Michel Basquiat, his family, and close associates. After so many publications without input, Basquiat’s sisters finally come out here and share some personal experiences.
Research-wise this book is somewhat useless as his estate was not able to catalog much detailed substance. Yet the works within, which Basquiat withheld in his personal collection—are some of his most brilliant, especially the drawings, dated or not.
Organised by the family of Basquiat, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue feature over 200 never before and rarely seen paintings, drawings, ephemera, and artifacts. The artist s contributions to the history of art and his exploration into our multi-faceted culture incorporating music, the Black experience, pop culture, African American sports figures, literature, and other sources are showcased alongside personal reminiscences and firsthand accounts providing unique insight into Basquiat s creative life and his singular voice that propelled the social and cultural narrative that continues to this day. Structured around key periods in his life, from his childhood and formative years,…
I love to eat and want to understand why we make the food choices we do—when we are lucky enough to have choices. I have an insatiable appetite for books that examine the underbelly of food traditions and policies. I have been studying the relationship between food and racism for over fifteen years, and I am still not even close to full.
Marcia Chatelain documents the surprising but significant role that McDonald’s played in the civil rights movement. As community hubs, its outlets were sites of protests and bombings. Later, Black franchise owners sued the company for race discrimination. The Golden Arches symbolize the hope and exploitation of Black capitalism. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a smorgasbord of stunning detail, and I’m lovin’ it.
Just as The Color of Law provided a vital understanding of redlining and racial segregation, Marcia Chatelain's Franchise investigates the complex interrelationship between black communities and America's largest, most popular fast food chain. Taking us from the first McDonald's drive-in in San Bernardino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, Chatelain shows how fast food is a source of both power-economic and political-and despair for African Americans. As she contends, fast food is, more than ever before, a key battlefield in the fight for racial justice.
I have always loved history—not so much the politics, the kings and wars and battles, but the remarkable, often eccentric people who stood out in the age in which they lived. When I started writing books for children, I fell naturally into writing biographies. Each book I’ve written has been an adventure, with research that took me into vanished worlds and introduced me to remarkable people, from Shakespeare and Joan of Arc to Peter the Great, Michelangelo, Cleopatra, and Leonardo da Vinci. I got to read their letters, learn little personal details about their lives, and live vicariously in their worlds. It’s been my life’s joyful work, and I appreciate the brilliant work of other authors who write biography too.
This is such a gorgeous book! Beautifully told by Pam Muñoz Ryan, this is the story of Marian Anderson, a little girl with a beautiful voice who battled racial prejudice in the pre-Civil Rights era to become one of America’s greatest singers. Brian Selznick’s illustrations are exquisite, done in soft sepia tones to give a feel for the period. And the book’s unique format will delight readers of any age. This is a book that inspires, touching hearts, and teaching young readers what courage, perseverance, and generosity can accomplish.
A harmonious introduction to one of our country's most important singers and role models--as envisioned by Newbery Honoree Pam Muñoz Ryan and Caldecott Medalist Brian Selznick.
Marian Anderson is best known for her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, which drew an integrated crowd of 75,000 people in pre-Civil Rights America. While this momentous event showcased the uniqueness of her voice, the strength of her character, and the struggles of the times in which she lived, it is only part of her story. Like the operatic arias Marian would come to sing, Ryan's text is as moving as…
I lived in sixteen places by the time I was twenty-two. A peripatetic youth may teach you that different is interesting, that stereotypes don’t hold, that the emperor has no clothes. When I moved South and worked as a journalist, I found black elders’ stories so different from the official stories of white authorities. Horrified that these men and women would die with their heroism untold, I interviewed more than 150 black activists for Stories of Struggle. I want to know what is missing; I want it found. Like a detective, an anthropologist, a scientist, and yes, a journalist, I want to know, and I want others to know.
The Race Beat quickly turns to open conflict. White-owned media wake up to the atrocities of racism. (It was way past time to pay attention. Exploring that is among the reasons I appreciate the book.) What follows seem like war movies.
We learn just how hard it was to get the story, photograph, or film; get the story out; get yourself out. Journalists for the white-owned Northern press, black-owned press, and TV networks are assaulted by enraged mobs during the Montgomery bus boycott, Central High School’s desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas; James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi; and Freedom Rides into Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama.
They dodge attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham and club-wielding ”posse men” in Selma. They persist. They make a daily record. Without them, the movement would have been “a bird without wings,” said John Lewis, Freedom Rider (and later, US senator).
An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.
Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who…
I’m an awkward academic who thinks, writes, and teaches about US immigration and imprisonment regimes and their growth out of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. I’m strongly motivated by things that I hate. I want to understand how and why we are facing such catastrophic problems, so that we can figure out how to undo them. My work is partly motivated by my personal history as the daughter of immigrants who moved to support their families and survive in the aftermath of war. As a privileged person in the US, I'm not directly affected by the state violence I study. I also know that we're not going to have a future unless we get there together.
This book has hugely influenced my thinking on US racism, imprisonment, and immigration, especially my second book. By studying a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Lytle Hernandez demonstrates how “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” This argument was a revelation that opened new ways for me to see the connections among different people swept away into cages. Like Dunbar-Ortiz, she reveals how settler colonialism connects working-class white, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican people targeted for arrest, imprisonment, and removal. Crucially, she reads “rebel archives” of those people who resisted their subjugation and fought for justice, showing how they never relinquished themselves to racist incarceration.
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest,…
I was introduced to genealogy, family pride, and racism as an only child. Growing up in Birmingham scarred me. Since young adulthood, I have worked on being an antiracist. I found that research on my ancestors, especially my maternal slaveholding side, helped me know my history, my family’s history as enslavers, my Black cousins, and what it means to be an American with all its flaws. I never tire of this research. It teaches me so much, has offered great gifts, and has built me a new family.
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.
WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.” —Isabel Wilkerson
An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America
We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone…
For much of my career as a sociologist and professor of social welfare, I’ve focused my research and teaching on the issue of economic and social inequality in America. Why should the United States have both great wealth and yet at the same time extreme poverty and inequities? This question has motivated much of my scholarly and popular writing over the years. For me, this represents the fault line of America. We profess the importance that all are created equal, and yet our actions undermine such a belief. Why should this be the case, and how can we change the reality to reflect the ideal?
This is a very powerful book that takes the city of St. Louis as a case study to illustrate the amount of violence, discrimination, and inequities that have happened across a 300-year period, particularly with respect to race.
Johnson develops the idea of racial capitalism throughout the book, and notes that “the red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” At the same time, the city has also been home to both communist and Black radical organizing into the 20th century.
A highly interesting and important case study of American inequality and exploitation.
A searing and "magisterial" (Cornel West) history of American racial exploitation and resistance, told through the turbulent past of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in The Broken Heart of America, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor Black residents, from slavery through redlining and…
Joanne McNeil has written about internet culture for over fifteen years. Her book considers the development of the internet from a user's perspective since the launch of the World Wide Web. Her interest in digital technology spans from the culture that enabled the founding of major companies in Silicon Valley to their reception in broader culture.
Black software, McIlwain writes, “refers to the programs we desire and design computers to run. It refers to who designs the program, for what purposes, and what or who becomes its object and data.” The book is a much needed examination of the role that Black entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and users contributed in building the internet.
Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter.
Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain,…
My father and I have written three books of narrative history. We tell stories from the American past that have a theme of interracial collaboration. Not sentimentally, but so that in a clear-eyed way, we can learn from moments in our history that may offer us hopeful ways forward. Growing up, I was shaped by narrative history techniques such as Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger and Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy. For this list, I wanted to share five favorite civil rights movement memoirs.
Few reflect on Dr. King more insightfully than Young, from strategy sessions to reflective late-night talks with Dr. King. His memories from campaigns like Birmingham are invaluable. There is both humor and great depth in the tale of Young’s life, from theological school and parish ministry to being at the center of the civil rights movement.
Andrew Young is one of the most important figures of the U.S. civil rights movement and one of America's best-known African American leaders. Working closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he endured beatings and arrests while participating in seminal civil rights campaigns. In 1964, he became Executive Director of the SCLC, serving with King during a time of great accomplishment and turmoil. In describing his life through his election to Congress in 1972, this memoir provides revelatory, riveting reading. Young's analysis of the connection between racism, poverty, and a militarized economy will resonate with…
I'm a lifelong reader and wanted to study literature from an early age. I grew up in Indianapolis, one of the cities reshaped by the Great Black Migration. I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago and found myself once again in the urban Midwest. My research for Conjuring the Folkled me to discover a trove of short stories by George Wylie Henderson, a Black writer from Alabama who migrated to Harlem. I edited the stories and published them as Harlem Calling: The Collected Stories of George Wylie Henderson. I'm a contributor toAfrican American Review, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration.
The Promised Land is written in an engaging, eloquent style that makes it an excellent introduction to the history of the Great Black Migration. A noted journalist, Lemann interviewed dozens of migrants and their descendants to create a richly textured story of their experiences. Layered onto this story is description and analysis of the political contexts for the migration, including the civil rights movement and the Great Society programs. He follows a group of Black Americans from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and, in some cases, back. He shows how the migration affected not just the migrants themselves, but America as a whole, for it shifted race relations from a regional to a national problem. Chicagoans like me will enjoy its wealth of local detail.
A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.
