18 Stirring Books About the Black Experience in America

In this eye-opening new photo book, award-winning photojournalist Richard Frishman partners with University of Virginia professor Dr. B. Brian Foster to document the ways in which racialized violence endures through our built environments. While some would have us believe that anti-Black violence in America is a thing of the past, Ghosts of Segregation illustrates that the vestiges of segregation and slavery are still embedded in contemporary spaces across the country, from old “colored entrances” at movie theaters in Washington state and Texas to the former slave exchange buildings in New Orleans. Frishman embarked on a 35,000-mile trek across the U.S. to photograph these hidden-in-plain-sight sites and structures. Enriching his photos are compelling essays about Black life in America by Foster. Together, they create a hauntingly beautiful work that examines the legacy of hate and violence in the United States and champions Black history, artistry, and resilience.

In her rousing essay collection from 2022, Brandi Collins-Dexter, the former senior campaign manager for Color of Change, explores Black voters’ mounting disaffection with the Democratic Party and the fragile political alliance that’s at risk of breaking down. A blend of research, cultural criticism, and personal storytelling, Black Skinhead offers a searing assessment of how politics as usual in America has failed the Black community, outlines the changes that need to be made, and details the consequences of not taking action. In making her argument, Collins-Dexter draws on everything from scholarly research and hard data to personal insights and the music of Kanye West, delivering an engaging current affairs narrative that demands to be read. 

In this award-winning nonfiction book from 2021, poet, journalist, and teacher Clint Smith embarks on a harrowing journey across America, exploring a side of the country that we rarely see. How the Word Is Passed documents the story of American slavery and its impact on the present day, reckoning with a legacy that all too often is taught through obscured half-truths. Smith takes readers to places like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, where the founding father enslaved more than 400 people, and Louisiana’s Angola Prison, a maximum-security facility and former plantation named after the country from which most of its enslaved people were stolen. By reflecting on America’s violent past and offering a true accounting of the Black experience, Smith brings attention to the nation’s history in an effort to change our present.

In his 2021 bestseller, multi-Grammy-winning artist Questlove delivers an ode to the joy of music that doubles as a spirited exploration of Black identity in America. Spanning the 1970s to the present day, Questlove’s narrative digs deep into the record crates of contemporary American music, championing the influential musicians and movements that redefined American pop culture. An engaging read for music obsessives and casual listeners alike, Music Is History leaves readers with a profound appreciation of Black artistic achievements in America and a greater understanding of one of today’s most celebrated artists.

In his illuminating historical narrative from 2021, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of America’s foremost cultural critics, chronicles the history of the Black church as a core component of American history and a driving force in the Civil Rights Movement. A companion book to the PBS series of the same name, The Black Church highlights the targeting of Black churches by white supremacists and the critical role many churches have played in social justice movements throughout the decades. Gates also examines how some churches continue to avoid politics, reinforce harmful thinking, or enact exclusionary practices in terms of gender, class, and sexuality. Regardless of any one church’s individual role, Gates makes it clear that to fully understand American history, one must understand the vital part that the Black church has played within it.

Many of us know the story of Madam C. J. Walker, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who rose to become one of the first Black female self-made millionaires in America after creating a revolutionary line of cosmetics for Black women. Fewer, perhaps, are familiar with the pioneering Black American entrepreneurs celebrated in 2018’s Black Fortunes. Author Shomari Wills brings to vivid life the incredible achievements of innovators like Mary Ellen Peasant, a 19th-century real estate magnate and financier who used the money she made in the Gold Rush to help abolitionists fight slavery, and O.W. Gurley, a schoolteacher and the founding developer of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as “Black Wall Street.” The men and women chronicled in these pages defied profoundly oppressive odds to achieve success in America. Their inspirational stories are vital in the oft-overlooked history of Black American excellence.

No list of books about American culture is complete without a work by James Baldwin. Released in 1963, Fire Next Time contains two groundbreaking essays. The first, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” is a letter written to his 14-year-old nephew about the role of race and racism in American history. The second, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” explores the intersection of race and religion in America. Baldwin’s landmark work galvanized readers across the nation as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Today it stands as an indispensable examination of American race relations and a reckoning with the past, present, and future of our national identity.

Taking its name from words spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib celebrates Black American performance in all its beauty and complexity. Abdurraqib, a MacArthur Fellow and celebrated poet and essayist, shines in his radiant essay collection from 2022, interweaving his personal experiences with the history of race, art, and politics in the United States as he delves into Black artistry and touches on everything from Soul Train to Patti LaBelle and the Wu-Tang Clan.

In When Broadway Was Black, published in 2023, cultural historian Caseen Gaines delves into the impact of Shuffle Along, a first-of-its-kind all-Black Broadway hit from 1921 that helped spark the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. Gaines reveals how the show’s creators overcame poverty and racial discrimination to produce the groundbreaking musical. The show challenged social and racial norms of the day, and its enormous success and popularity marked the beginning of a new era of entertainment in America.

A must-read for music lovers, 2022’s The Come Up by award-winning journalist Jonathan Abrams chronicles the evolution of hip-hop from its early days in the South Bronx to its transformation into a world-dominating musical and cultural force. Abrams’s oral history draws on more than 300 interviews with the artists, producers, and DJs who helped launch a musical revolution. While the history of hip-hop is integral to understanding Black artistic expression in America, much of its story is at risk of being lost. Abrams seeks to rectify this, delivering an electrifying and essential account told by some of the most influential voices in contemporary music.

An expert on the American economy, Heather McGhee argues in 2021’s The Sum of Us that institutional racism is a root cause of America’s ongoing economic woes. While racism is rightfully blamed for damaging the economic prospects of members of the Black community, it’s often overlooked as a contributor to broader social and economic dysfunction, from collapsing social safety nets to the debt crisis and stagnant wages. In her insightful account, McGhee draws on case studies from across the country to outline her argument and advance what she calls the “Solidarity Dividend,” or the benefit we will all see when we stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game and start helping those most harmed by discriminatory policies.

In her 2022 National Book Award–winning South to America, Imani Perry paints a vivid picture of the Southern United States and captures the complexities of folks who reside below the Mason–Dixon line. A native Alabamian, Perry returns home to chronicle the stories of people from all walks of life, including her ancestors. Within these stories is the argument that to fully understand America and build a better future, we must understand the complex histories of the South.

In this extraordinary history anthology from 2021, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain gather 90 different writers to cover 400 years of African American history. Four Hundred Souls begins in 1619, a year before the landing of the Mayflower, when the White Lion privateer ship arrived at the English colony of Virginia with 20 to 30 enslaved Africans on board. Each chapter in the anthology moves forward in time by five years, reclaiming the centrality of the Black experience in America and closing the gap between the historical narratives we’ve been told and the Black realities that are so often ignored.

In this celebrated history book from 2021, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed blends personal storytelling with compelling research to chronicle Juneteenth, the Texas-born holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. A native Texan herself, Gordon-Reed offers a comprehensive accounting of the important day in On Juneteenth and seeks to clarify Texas’s history and the part its slave-based economy played in both the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. While historical narratives of Texas are dominated by white cowboys and oil ranchers, Gordon-Reed’s account highlights the frequently overlooked experiences of Black Texans, their role in shaping the state’s evolution through the years, and the hardships they’ve endured since Reconstruction.

If you haven’t yet read this award-winning history narrative from 2021, which builds on the pioneering journalism project undertaken by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, you should pick up a copy immediately. The 1619 Project is a collection of essays that retell American history through the lens of slavery. America’s origin and identity are so intertwined with slavery that it must be at the center of our understanding of our nation. Hannah-Jones’s sweeping account, which draws its title from the 1619 landing of the White Lion mentioned above, serves as a reminder that our nation’s history didn’t begin in 1776.

In Three Girls from Bronzeville, journalist Dawn Turner revisits the Chicago neighborhood where she grew up and explores how it impacted her life and the lives of two people very close to her: Kim, her little sister, and Debra, her best friend. All three girls hailed from working-class families that arrived in Chicago during the Great Migration. The trio grew up in the 1970s, coming of age under a tradition of togetherness and community while living through redlining, city neglect, and a deepening drug crisis. Turner deftly captures the promise and peril of her upbringing in her moving memoir from 2021, tracing the diverging paths that she and her loved ones took, while offering a “probing inquiry into fate, frailty, tenacity, and ultimately, redemption” (Booklist, starred review).

Fans of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist or Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre are sure to appreciate Hood Feminism, Mikki Kendall’s sharp and lively book of essays from 2020 that bolsters the voices of those so often left out of mainstream feminist spaces. The author applies an intersectional lens to issues that are regularly written about from white, upper-middle-class perspectives, whether it’s gun violence and eating disorders or poverty and housing. Kendall illustrates how ignoring racial and class components of feminist issues excludes wide swaths of the affected populations in America, particularly Black people below the poverty line. The author also critiques how privileged women actively oppress marginalized women, and she calls for the mainstream feminist movement to reckon with the ways it invalidates the experiences of those most in need of solidarity.

Punch Me Up to the Gods is a stunning, hilarious, and heartbreaking LGBTQ+ memoir by Brian Broome that recounts the author’s experience growing up in Ohio as a misunderstood queer Black kid with abusive parents, secret crushes, and a world telling him that he’s somehow wrong. Anchored by the couplets in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” Broome’s 2021 memoir wrestles with how being taught to be the “right” kind of masculine shaped his upbringing in complicated ways and examines what it means to be Black and gay in contemporary America.