10 Black American Books To Read
You should always celebrate Black voices (not just during Black History Month), and literature is one of the best ways to honor some of the community’s most illuminating stories. We’ve selected some of the all-time 10 Black American Books To Read to add to your reading list.
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10 Black American Books To Read
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages. Light-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man’s mule or adornment.
Though Jaine’s story does not end happily, it does draw to a satisfying conclusion. Janie is one black woman who doesn’t have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done “two things everbody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Drawing on James Baldwin’s own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if ‘the Holy Ghost were riding on the air’. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different.
This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.
Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clearsighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide ‘physical, intellectual and moral training’ which will equip its inmates to become ‘honorable and honest men’.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Soon after a local eccentric leaps from a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight, Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead III is born. Brought up by his well-off black family to revere the white world around him, Milkman strives to make sense of his conflicting identities. Always seeking flight in some way, he leaves his Michigan home for the South, retracing the steps of his forebears in search of his own buried heritage and is introduced to an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins; the inhabitants of a fully realised black world.
Evocative and kaleidoscopic, Song of Solomon is a brilliantly imagined coming-of-age tale.
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
It’s the summer of ’48 in the city of Angels and there’s heat on the streets when Daphne Monet hits the sidewalk. Heat when she disappears with a trunkload of somebody else’s cash.
Easy Rawlins is a war veteran just fired from his job. Drinking in a friend’s bar, he wonders how to meet his mortgage when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will locate Miss Monet, a blonde with a reputation.
It’s a simple decision, but for one thing. Nobody warned him – better the devil you know…
In the sleazy, fearful city, Easy must rely on his instincts, not just to solve the case, but to save his own life.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou’s seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s lover
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible ‘simply because people refuse to see me’. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison’s invisible man – from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot – go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Set in the deep American South between the wars, The Color Purple is the classic tale of Celie, a young black girl born into poverty and segregation.
Raped repeatedly by the man she calls ‘father’, she has two children taken away from her, is separated from her beloved sister Nettie and is trapped into an ugly marriage.
But then she meets the glamorous Shug Avery, singer and magic-maker – a woman who has taken charge of her own destiny. Gradually Celie discovers the power and joy of her own spirit, freeing her from her past and reuniting her with those she loves.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
oates takes readers along on his journey through America’s history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings – moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield, a journey to Chicago’s South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America’s “long war on black people,” or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police.
In his trademark style – a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage – Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
n 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer. In 1815, she is assumed a slave.
When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he’s drowning. She saves his life – and it will happen again and again.
Neither of them understands his power to summon her whenever his life is threatened, nor the significance of the ties that bind them.
And each time Dana saves him, the more aware she is that her own life might be over before it’s even begun.
Octavia E. Butler’s ground-breaking masterpiece is the extraordinary story of two people bound by blood, separated by so much more than time.
If you enjoyed 10 Black American Books To Read, check out Colson Whitehead: A Colossus in New York
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