The most recommended books about Jim Crow laws

This classic work, originally published in 1940, provides a panoramic examination of African American insurance companies (including a detailed overview of individual firms).

Although An Economic Detour focuses on black insurers, its’ broader analysis encompassed all black-owned enterprises during this period. Specifically, Stuart declared that, under the dictates of Jim Crow racial segregation, African American entrepreneurs were relegated to only serving African American consumers.

This, necessarily, had an inhibiting impact on their profitability. Especially since non-African American entrepreneurs also had access to the African American consumer market.

As someone who has written extensively on black-owned insurance companies, An Economic Detour has been a long-standing “go-to” resource for me.

This is a sweeping epic of a book and should be required reading for any student of film history.

Told in a manner that is at once intimate and authoritative, it reads like both a textbook and a biography, detailing the lives of a series of historical figures as a means of relating the history of the Black image in film.

In doing so, Haygood contextualizes the cinematic developments of the past by placing them alongside the social and political developments of the time, showing that you can never truly separate fact from fiction. 

Monumental, extraordinary, a landmark: only superlatives would do in 1975 to praise Simple Justice by Richard Kluger.

If you want to understand education in America, race in America, the absence of equity in America, Simple Justice gets you there. The book begins with the South Carolina heroes of Briggs v. Elliott, impoverished rural petitioners who filed the first of five lawsuits composing Brown v. Board of Education. The book ends with the 1954 and 1955 US Supreme Court’s decisions declaring unconstitutional the legal segregation of public schools.

Kluger focuses on people, beginning with tenant farmers and sharecroppers who defied the white men controlling their every breath and petitioned for “equal everything.” Kluger’s vivid storytelling was among my inspirations, forty years after Brown, to seek South Carolina’s forgotten heroes. 

Nearly fifty years ago, Eric Foner jumpstarted popular interest in the post-Civil War era with his magisterial Reconstruction.

Egerton’s engagingly-written work is the best recent history of the period, and a fitting heir to Foner’s accomplishment. I’m impressed by how much new scholarship Egerton incorporates, particularly on the activism of African Americans, and I like how clearly he shows how forward-looking legislation on education, election law, and civil rights advanced by the architects of Reconstruction set the stage for enlightened policies that would only come to full fruition in the 20th century. Reconstruction was ultimately choked by conservative reaction and the oppression of the Jim Crow era.

Egerton sees the Reconstruction era, as I do, as a great lost opportunity to overcome the legacy of slavery and strengthen democracy.

This succinct and persuasive study of the profound failure to integrate the freed slave population in the U.S. after 1865 is a rare example of a scholarly work’s direct influence on governments and the process of reform.  The author’s premise and analysis is that popular and local official antipathy to emancipation led to enforced, violent segregation (Jim Crow) that was constitutionally affirmed in the 1896 Plessy case.  The book’s three editions follow the history of civil rights reform from the 1950s to the 1970s and the Supreme Court’s gradual dismantling of the Plessy rule. While Jim Crow law has been overturned, versions of real-life Jim Crow conditions remain.

Barbara Small’s novel is about the interwoven lives of a Black family and a White family facing the challenges of surviving while raising their children in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression.

The vivid language and sense details of Faith’s Reckoning transported me completely into the very different worlds the characters experienced in this riveting page-turner. What I loved most was how they transformed their suffering into a desire to improve the worlds they inhabited, not only for themselves but also others. The personal reckonings they made by changing their lives evoked a depth of empathy that has changed me.

These characters continue to stay in my heart, and like friends I cherish them still. In fact, I hope to see a sequel and a movie one day!

It is hard to believe that this book first appeared eighty years ago. At a time when Jim Crow ruled and leading scholars adamantly argued for slavery’s benign nature, Aptheker proved that slavery was a savage institution that enslaved Americans violently resisted from the colonial era through the Civil War. Written by a radical White historian who commanded Black soldiers during the Second World War, the book obliterates the idea of the passive and pliant slave. 

As a reader, these shared life experiences may prove to be the closest you will ever come to walking in someone else’s shoes. This book would have the greatest impact on historically privileged Americans if read with an open heart. Immensely enlightening: Lythcott-Haims does more than take the reader on a walk through her lived experiences. She shared the complex building blocks found in England, Africa, and America that impacted her mother’s character, along with the extraordinarily successful professional life of her father.

I watched a lot of Jackie Robinson movies, and I read many books about him to write my book. None capture the totality of his character like Robinson’s autobiography.

Too much focus is usually put on his first season in the majors when he won over his teammates, fans, and a skeptical nation with his restraint and excellence on the field. In reality, Robinson was a complicated man who was court-martialed in the Army for refusing to sit in the back of a bus, had fantasies of anger against his harassers in the major leagues, and clashed with Black Power groups in the 1960s.

America needed its Robinson myth for a long time, but as usual, you get more truth from going right to the source.

Separate Pasts is McLaurin’s account of his 1950s boyhood in the tiny hamlet of Wade, North Carolina, years when the Jim Crow system still reigned. He describes the complex, interconnected lives of the town’s white and black families, and his own confusion as he tried to make sense of the contradictions he observed in his world. A painfully honest account of a white boy’s reckoning with the legacies of segregation and oppression, McLaurin reveals how his own relationships with black neighbors undermined the racist beliefs he was taught.