Black History Month

Our Secret Society : Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement
by Tanisha C. Ford

Drawing on exhaustive research, never-before-revealed letters and interviews, including with her daughter and namesake, a historian and cultural critic presents this glittering social history of Mollie Moon, the half of one of the most influential couples of the period, charting her rise from Jim Crow Mississippi to doyenne of Manhattan and Harlem. Illustrations.
Black Women Taught Us : An Intimate History of Black Feminism
by Jenn M. Jackson

This collection of eleven original essays from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to Audre Lorde explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders and repositions their intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements.
Black Ball : Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA
by Theresa Runstedtler

Against the backdrop of ongoing massive resistance to racial desegregation and increasingly strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder. The press and the public blamed young Black players for the chaos in the NBA. But Black Ball argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the NBA as the star-laden powerhouse we know today, thanks largely to the efforts of Black players in challenging the white basketball establishment of owners, coaches, and spectators.
I Saw Death Coming : A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction
by Kidada E. Williams

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond.
Master Slave, Husband Wife : An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom
by Ilyon Woo

Recounts the extraordinary and harrowing true story of a young, enslaved couple who, achieving one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history, embarked on three epic journeys in one monumental bid for freedom, challenging the nation's core precepts of life, liberty and justice for all. Illustrations.
The Small and the Mighty : Twelve Unsung Americans who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement
by Sharon McMahon

Offers inspiring portraits of 12 ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of the United States.
James : A Novel
by Percival Everett

Describes the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, who decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island after learning he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans.
The House of Eve : A Novel
by Sadeqa Johnson

In 1950s Philadelphia and Washington, DC, the lives of 15-year-old Ruby Pearsall, whose taboo affair threatens her dreams of being the first in her family to attend college, and Eleanor Quarles, who hopes having a baby will gain her husband's wealthy family's acceptance, collide in the most unexpected of ways.
Let Us Descend : A Novel
by Jesmyn Ward

In the years before the Civil War, Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march, seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, opening herself to a world beyond this world.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride

When a skeleton is unearthed in the small, close-knit community of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1972, an unforgettable cast of characters—living on the margins of white, Christian America—closely guard a secret, especially when the truth is revealed about what happened and the part the town's white establishment played in it.
The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett

Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
The American Daughters : A Novel
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Ady, when she's separated from her mother, meets Lenore, a free black woman who invites her to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters, setting her on a journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.
Take My Hand
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

In 1973 Montgomery, Alabama, Civil Townsend, a young black nurse working for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, grapples with her role when she takes two young girls into her heart and the unthinkable happens, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.
The Nickel Boys : A Novel
by Colson Whitehead

A follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning, The Underground Railroad, follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.