One way to mark Black History Month is to read books by Black authors about Black people and their lives. You can find book recommendations from all sorts of places, but we decided to stick close to home where the staff at Cuyahoga County Public Library came up with the following list. Enjoy!
Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen
By George McCalman
Illustrated Black History is a breathtaking collection of original portraits depicting black heroes—both famous and unsung—who made their mark on activism, science, politics, business, medicine, technology, food, arts, entertainment, and more. Each entry includes a lush drawing or painting by artist George McCalman, along with an insightful essay summarizing the person’s life story.
Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality
By Tomiko Brown-Nagin
The first major biography of one of our most influential judges—an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary—that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century.
Black on Black: On Our Resilience and Brilliance in America
By Daniel Black
Black’s new collection of essays dig deep into Blackness, history and racial tension in this country, while simultaneously serving as a powerful call to action and a celebration of Black culture. “Black on Black” is not an easy read. Black’s voice is strong, informed, angry, and relentless — and that infuses his essays with the power to affect readers.
American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics
By Kevin Hazzard
The story of an unjustly forgotten group of Black men in Pittsburgh who became the first paramedics in America, saving lives and changing the course of emergency medicine around the world.
Until the 1970s, if you suffered a medical crisis, your chances of survival were minimal. A 9-1-1 call might bring police or even the local funeral home. But that all changed with Freedom House EMS in Pittsburgh, a group of Black men who became America’s first paramedics and set the gold standard for emergency medicine around the world, only to have their story and their legacy erased—until now.
Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation
By Kris Manjapra
If the 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which life in the United States has been shaped by the existence of slavery, this focuses on emancipation and how its afterlife further codified the racial caste system—instead of obliterating it.
To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt.
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
By Nikole Hannah-Jones
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a 2021 anthology of essays and poetry, published by Random House’s One World imprint on November 16, 2021. It is a book-length expansion of the essays presented in the 1619 Project issue of The New York Times Magazine in August 2019.
Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance
By Alvin Hall
Alvin Hall takes us on a journey through America’s haunted racial past, with the legendary Green Book as our guide. For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In 2019, award-winning broadcaster and educator Alvin Hall and social activist and trainer Janée Woods Weber hit the road for a 12-day, 2,000 mile trip from Detroit to New Orleans. The route they drove was based on information gathered from the historic travel guide, “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” an annually published guide to navigate trips, patronize Black-owned businesses, and come together in the face of institutionalized racism.
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
By Matthew F. Delmont
When it comes to the conflagration that was World War II, the struggle over its memory — why it was fought, who fought it, and the lessons it taught later generations about the meaning of freedom — continues today on behalf of the Black Americans who had to “fight for the right to fight.”
In Half American, Guggenheim Fellow and Dartmouth professor of history Matthew F. Delmont provides a much-needed corrective to the glut of rosy “Greatest Generation” tomes with the first-ever comprehensive history of the Second World War as experienced by Black Americans.
Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution
By Elie Mystal
“Allow Me to Retort” is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.
Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture
By Zeba Blay
In 2013, film and culture critic Zeba Blay was one of the first people to coin the viral term #carefreeblackgirls on Twitter. As she says, it was “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online.”
In this collection of essays, Carefree Black Girls, Blay expands on this initial idea by delving into the work and lasting achievements of influential Black women in American culture–writers, artists, actresses, dancers, hip-hop stars–whose contributions often come in the face of bigotry, misogyny and stereotypes.
