Black Lives Matter
Academics in the Centre for American Studies have put together a list of resources for anyone interested in learning more about the Black Lives Matter movement. This list is not exhaustive but it offers a useful starting point for further reading.
The Centre is committed to anti-racist, inclusive learning, teaching, and research – many of the items on this list are drawn from our current module reading lists.
We affirm that Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter mural in Charlotte, NC. Source: David A. Thrower | @7Hangtime on Instagram
Immediate materials for understanding the Black Lives Matter Movement
- Isaac Chatiner, A Black Lives Matter Activist Explains why this time is different,The New Yorker
- Alicia Garza, "A HerStory of Black Lives Matter" (2014)
- Angela Davis, 'As long as the violence of racism remains, no one is safe' (2020)
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019)
- Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
- Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist (2019).
- Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018)
- Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (2017)
- Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race (2017)
- German Lopez, Why you should stop saying “all lives matter,” explained in 9 different ways, Vox.com,
- Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter (2017)
- DeRay Mckesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: Race and Justice in a Divided America (2019)
- Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality (2020)
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
- Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016)
- Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful, The Ezra Klein Show,
Fiction
- James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)
- James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)
- Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
- Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)
- Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (1934)
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville (2015)
- William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer (1962)
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye: A Novel (1970)
- Ann Petry, The Street (1946)
- Kylie Reid, Such a Fun Age (2019)
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
- Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)
- Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (2019)
- Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
Non-Fiction
- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
- Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (2018)
- Toni Morrison,"Mourning for Whiteness"(2016)
- Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1988)
- Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013)
- Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
Films and Television Shows
- 12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013)
- 13th (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2016)
- Atlanta (Donald Glover, 2016-)
- Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018)
- black-ish (Kenya Barris, 2014-)
- BlacKkKlansman (dir. Spike Lee, 2018)
- Boyz n the Hood (dir. John Singleton, 1991)
- Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991)
- Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1989)
- Fruitvale Station (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2013)
- Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017)
- I Am Not Your Negro (Roaul Peck, 2016)
- If Beale Street Could Talk (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2018)
- Killer of Sheep (dir. Charles Burnett, 1978)
- Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2016)
- One False Move (dir. Carl Franklin, 1992)
- Pose (Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, Steven Canals, 2018-)
- Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014)
Poetry and Drama
- Jericho Brown, The Tradition (2019)
- Jericho Brown, “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry” (2020)
- Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), SOS: Poems 1961-2013 (2016)
- Gwendolyn Brooks, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (2014), Selected Poems (2006)
- Lucille Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (2012)
- Lucille Clifton, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (2020)
- Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (2020)
- Wanda Coleman, The Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors (2011)
- Countee Cullen, Collected Poems (2014)
- Rita Dove, Collected Poems (2016)
- Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (2018)
- Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
- Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (2000)
- Robert Hayden, Collected Poems (2013)
- Terrence Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (2018)
- Terrence Hayes, “George Floyd” (2020)
- Angela Jackson, All these Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (1997)
- June Jordan, Directed by Desire (2005)
- Etheridge Knight, The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986)
- Yusef Komunyakaa, The Emperor of Water Clocks (2015)
- Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993)
- Langston Hughes, Selected/Collected Poems (various edition)
- Clarence Major, From Now On: New and Selected Poems 1970-2015 (2015)
- Clarence Major, ed. The Garden Thrives: 20th Century African-American Poetry (1996)
- Claude McKay, Complete Poems (2008)
- Aja Monet, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (2017)
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
- Claudia Rankine, “Weather” (2020)
- Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2011)
- Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (2012)
- Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead: Poems (2017)
- Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings (2002)
- August Wilson, Fences (1985)
Podcasts and Music
- 1619 (Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, 2019)
- 2Pac, Strictly 4 MY N.I.G.G.A.Z.(1993)
- The Hereafter (produced by Eve Tuck)
- Beyonce, Lemonade (2016)
- Che Lingo, “My Block” (2020)
- Childish Gambino, This is America (2018)
- Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues” (1971)
- Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
- N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton (1988)
- YG, “FTP” (2020)
Understanding Black Women’s History
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (2014)
- Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women's History of the United States (2020)
- B. Collier-Thompson & V.P. Franklin, Sisters in Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (2001)
- Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (1981)
- Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The struggle over woman suffrage and black suffrage in Reconstruction America (2011)
- Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984)
- bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989)
- bell hooks, ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism (1981)
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
- Morgan Jerkins, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America (2018)
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)
- R. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (1998)
- Emily West, Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation (2014)
- Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)
Histories of Policing and Punishment in the United States
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)
- Gloria Browne-Marshall, Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present (2007)
- Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
- Shaun Gabbidon and Helen Greene, Race, Crime, and Justice: a Reader (2005)
- Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016)
- Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015)
- Leonard Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (2010)
- Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010)
- Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)
Abolition and Civil Rights
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (1988)
- Clayborne Carson, In Struggle (1981)
- James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America (1991)
- David Doddington, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (2018)
- Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (2000)
- John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement (1994)
- Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham (1997)
- Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
- Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America (1987)
- Glenn Feldman [ed.], Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004)
- David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (1986)
- Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and its Legacy (2015)
- Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (March 2005)
- Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (2007)
- Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010)
- Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (1992)
- M.J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004)
- Steven Lawson, Black Ballots (1976)
- Steven Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics (1985)
- George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (2006)
- Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies [eds.] From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012)
- Howell Raines [ed.] My Soul is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (1977)
- Belinda Robnett, How long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (1997)
- James Patterson, Brown vs. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001)
- Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016)
- Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (2010)
- Tim Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999)
- William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon (1992)
- Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain [eds.], Long is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (2009)
- Thomas Wagstaff, Black Power (1969)
- Clive Webb [ed.] Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (2005)
- Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun (2007)
- Gary Younge, No Place Like Home (1999)
- Gary Younge, Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (2006)
- Gary Younge, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016)
Race and Latin America
- George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America (2004)
- Herman L. Bennet, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009)
- Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back (any edition)
- Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo Garofalo (eds), Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the early modern Ibero-Atlantic World (2009)