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How it started
Negro History Week’, started in February 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, the "father of Black history," was the initial version of Black History Month.
The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, founded by this historian, aims to encourage "people of various ethnic and social backgrounds to explore the Black experience.”
Also for why it was chosen to be in February is because it is meant to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, the US president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and Frederick Douglas, an African American orator, social reformer, writer, and abolitionist, who were both born in February. Thus, Canada and US celebrate Black History Month in February, while in the UK, the Netherlands, and Ireland it is in October. (EU)
Black writers have transformed the world with the indomitable force of their words, tackling the most critical social justice concerns of their day while also delivering compelling stories about how Black people live and love.
In this list, I include essential literacy works by modern and emerging authors who are rethinking the canon.
Explore these works to gain a better knowledge of the Black experience in all of its facets. Since it’s 2022, here are my 22 must-reads during Black History Month, no actually Black History Month is all year around.
1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
(Autobiography)
In this coming-of-age memoir, acclaimed writer and poet Maya Angelou details her experiences with racism, sexual trauma, and violence she experienced as a young girl. Years later, she finds the freedom to heal through great literary works from authors such as William Shakespeare, the kindness of others, and ultimately, self-love. This story, the first in a seven-volume series, is essential reading not only for Black History Month but for life.
2. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
(Biography)
Over 30 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne spoke to anyone he could find who knew Malcolm X. What resulted is this incredible biography of the civil rights leader, which paints a portrait of Malcolm X unlike any other. The winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, this biography is a must-read.
3. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
(Novel/Fiction/Bildungsroman)
People refuse to notice me, thus I am invisible... When people approach me, all they perceive is my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – in other words, everything and everything but me." Invisible Man, Mr. Ellison wrote.
The story follows an unidentified narrator, a Black guy who grows up in a tiny Southern town, attends a Black college, and then comes to New York, where his life takes a turn. The well-known novel examines concerns of race and societal institutions that are still relevant today.
4. How to Talk to Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down by Y-Vonne Hutchinson
(self-help)
How to Talk to Your Boss About Race is a must-read guide for getting over fear and pushing for change. You can make antiracist change at work, no matter how much formal influence you have.
Racism has been exposed at every institution in our country as a result of reporting and personal testimony. But simply being aware of racism's existence isn't nearly enough. Posts on social media about #BlackLivesMatter are good, but how can you persuade leaders to take meaningful antiracist action?
Y-Vonne Hutchinson, a diversity and inclusion strategist, works with tech titans, political leaders, and Fortune 500 corporations to help them talk about racism and bigotry more productively and take action. Hutchinson provides a framework for thinking about race at work, prepares employees to have frank and effective conversations with more powerful leaders, helps them center marginalized perspectives, and explains how to leverage power dynamics to get results while avoiding backlash and gaslighting in this clear and accessible guide.
5. The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
(Historical Romance)
As tensions rise and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations—culminate in a climactic judgement.
The Prophets cleverly reveals the pain and suffering from entitlement, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.
The love tale of Samuel and Isaiah, two enslaved men who defy their masters' intent to use them for breeding by choosing to love one other instead, lies at the heart of "The Prophets.”
6. Mourning my inner[black girl] child by Reelaviolette Botts-Ward
(Poetry)
This book is an unapologetically honest look at girlhood vulnerability, ancestral grief, and embodied remembrance. Reelaviolette botts-ward travels through personal interactions with her mother(s), her house, her body, and her precarity in her exploration of numerous pasts and various identities.
Relaviolette exposes the im/possibilities of Black girlhood, slippages of Black motherhood, and matrilineal legacies of violence as she mourns her deepest wounds. She recounts so many of our stories while telling hers.
The poetry of reelaviolette inspires Black women to go deeper into their recovery and to reconnect with the tiny girl within who has a holy word for the world. Her Black feminist understanding of the lessons to be learned from girlhood trauma is both refreshing and groundbreaking.
7. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis
(Essay/Political Science/Civil rights)
Angela Y. Davis, a world-renowned activist, and researcher illustrates the linkages between battles against state brutality and oppression throughout history and throughout the world in this newly collected collection of writings, interviews, and speeches.
Davis explores the legacy of prior liberation efforts, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement, in light of the relevance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's battles. She draws parallels between today's fights against state violence, from Ferguson to Palestine, and analyzes them.
8. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
(Bildungsroman/Novel/Fiction)
The Bluest Eye is a narrative about women who are oppressed. The women in the story are subjected to not just the horrors of racial discrimination, but also the tyranny and abuse perpetrated by the males in their life.
Several stages of a woman's growth towards womanhood are depicted in the novel.
9. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
(Bildungsroman/Fiction)
Bri, who is sixteen years old, aspires to be one of the best rappers of all time. Or at the very least, get out of her area.
Bri has large shoes to fill as the daughter of an underground rap artist who died before breaking big.
Food banks and cutoff warnings are now as much a part of Bri's life as beats and rhymes, because to her mother's untimely job loss.
Bri no longer wants to make it—she has to make it. With debts piling up and the threat of homelessness looming over her family, Bri no longer wants to make it—she has to make it.
10. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
(Essay/Biography)
When it was initially published in 1963, The Fire Next Time became a national bestseller, galvanizing the country and giving a passionate voice to the burgeoning civil rights movement.
The book is an incredibly intimate and challenging work that is both a compelling evocation of James Baldwin's early childhood in Harlem and a distressing assessment of the ramifications of racial injustice.
It consists of two "letters" issued on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation's centenary, in which both black and white Americans are urged to combat racism's horrible legacy.
11. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
(Epistolary Novel
This book will almost certainly come up in any discussion about black trauma, toxic masculinity, and survival.
Celie is a poor black lady whose letters span 20 years, starting at the age of 14 when she is mistreated and raped by her father and attempts to shield her sister from the same fate, and ending with her marriage to "Mister," a vicious man who terrorizes her.
Celie's fury, mixed with an example of love and independence supplied by her close friend Shug, propels her toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.
Three years after its publication in 1982, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was adapted for the big screen.
12. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
(Dissertation/Law Material)
The black community has long been afflicted by mass imprisonment. Despite accounting for only 13% of the population, black people account for 40% of the jail population.
Michelle Alexander connects this gap to the drug war, which was designed to militarise police and split black communities, but she also highlights its long-term consequences and continuing nature.
13. How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones
(Memoir/Biography)
How We Fight for Our Lives is a fascinating coming-of-age story of a young, black, homosexual guy from the South as he struggles to carve out a place for himself within his family, nation, and personal ambitions, wants, and anxieties.
Jones invites readers into his youth and adolescence through a series of vignettes that follow a journey through the American landscape—into difficult relationships with his family, into fleeting flings with lovers, friends, and strangers.
Each piece leads to an analysis of racism and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrayal of what we do for—and to—one another as we struggle to become ourselves.
14. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
(Poetry/Bibliography/Creative Non-fiction)
The anthology addresses, as coeditor Cherre Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of colour subjugation and liberation" via personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimony, poetry, and visual art.
Bridge continues to represent a developing concept of feminism, one that can adapt to, and assist enlighten, changing economic and social realities of women of colour in the United States and across the world.
15. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
(Biography)
Wilkerson portrays The Great Migration, a decades-long migration of Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, in this masterwork of epic, Steinbeckian scale, woven in an ageless voice replete with lyrical and folk knowledge.
Wilkerson portrays a nationwide movement via the arduous journeys of three people who risked everything to plant roots far from home, drawing on a massive amount of research, including over a thousand interviews and newly revealed public data.
These migrants fashioned American cities in their own image, making them into the vibrant places we live today, thanks to their food, faith, and culture. Wilkerson makes apparent the "unrecognised immigration" that has built our modern nation in these towering, compulsively engaging pages.
16. Luster by Raven Leilani
(Novel/Humour/Literary fiction)
Raven Leilani's Luster is a depiction of a young Black woman attempting to make sense of her existence — her hunger, her rage — in a volatile era.
It's irresistibly chaotic and beautifully beautiful, razor-sharp and subtly humorous, sexually charged and totally captivating.
She becomes connected with a forty-something white man who is married openly. It's also a sad, heartbreaking portrayal of how difficult it is to believe in one's own abilities, as well as the unexpected forces that lead us deeper inside ourselves.
17. How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
(Guidebook/Travel literature)
This bold engagement with slavery, as depicted in the nation's monuments, plantations, and landmarks, is one of the decade's most imaginative works of nonfiction.
Smith sees the wounds of slavery hidden in plain sight as he travels the country, from Confederate graves to farms turned tourist traps like Monticello.
Smith discusses how slavery has influenced our collective history and how we could aspire for a more truthful collective future as he considers how the darkest chapter of our nation's past has been sanitised for public consumption
18. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
(Autoethnography)
Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and philosopher from Martinique, is mandatory reading for anybody interested in anti-colonial ideas.
Fanon's own experiences, as well as the history of colonialism and its reliance on dominance, racism, dehumanization, and genocide, are explored in Black Skin, White Masks.
Fanon examines how these influences affect the oppressor's and oppressed's human psyches, particularly when it comes to internalized notions of inferiority.
19. The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
(Thriller/Suspense/Literary fiction)
In this enthralling debut, Get Out meets The Stepford Wives as it explores the tension that arises when two young Black women meet in the glaringly white world of New York City publishing.
Nella Rogers, a 26-year-old editing assistant at Wagner Books, is fed up with being the only Black employee. She's tired of the solitude and microaggressions, so when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle next to hers, she's overjoyed. They've only just begun comparing natural hair care routines when a series of awkward circumstances propels Hazel to Office Darling, leaving Nella in the dust.
Then the notes start showing up on Nella's desk: LEAVE WAGNER. RIGHT NOW.
It's difficult to imagine Hazel is the source of these threatening communications. But as Nella spirals and obsesses over the nefarious forces at work, she understands that there's a lot more at stake than simply her job.
20. Sula by Toni Morrison
(Novel/Fiction)
This fascinating and emotional tale follows the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit infancy in a tiny Ohio town to their eventual confrontation and reconciliation.
Nel Wright has decided to marry, have a family, and become a pillar of the black community in the town where she was born. Sula Peace has eschewed Nel's way of life, enrolling in college and immersing herself in city life.
She reverts to her former self as a rebel and a wanton seductress when she returns to her origins.
Both ladies will eventually have to deal with the repercussions of their decisions. They provide an indelible image of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America when they work together.
21. Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington
(LGBT Literature/Domestic fiction)
Lot is a moving story of a Black Latino youngster who is suffering with domestic violence and coming to grips with his sexuality.
The young guy navigates a world of intolerance, poverty, and tenacity as he finds he likes boys. "A young lady whose affair detonates throughout an apartment complex, a scrappy baseball team, a bunch of young hustlers, storm survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan adolescent under his wing, and a hesitant chupacabra," according to the novel, which is set in Houston.
22. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
(Novel/Fiction)
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping novel about one girl's struggle for justice.
Starr Carter, a sixteen-year-old girl, lives in two worlds: the underprivileged neighborhood where she lives and the posh suburban prep school where she goes.
When Starr watches her childhood best friend Khalil being fatally shot by a police officer, the uncomfortable equilibrium between both worlds is destroyed. Khalil didn't have any weapons.
His death becomes a nationwide headline not long after. He's been dubbed a thug, a drug dealer, and a gangbanger by some. In Khalil's honor, protesters are marching to the streets. Starr and her family are being harassed by cops and a local drug lord. What everyone truly wants to know is what happened that night. And Starr is the only person living who can answer it
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