BM Library

Below is a working list of books we’ve read, have influenced us, and/or are on our personal reading lists. If you’ve read any of these books and are interested in writing a review, tell us on our submissions page! And if you have a suggestion, please comment below.

Autobiographies 

  • Assata, An Autobiography 
  • Decoded, Jay Z
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  • Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, Janet Mock
  • Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

Black Feminism and Womanism 

  • Ain’t I A Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks
  • At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle L. McGuire
  • Black Girl Dangerous: On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender, Mia McKenzie
  • Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Barbara Ransby
  • In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Alice Walker
  • Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis

History, Analysis and Theory 

  • Medical Apartheid:The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet A. Washington
  • Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Joy DeGruy
  • Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky
  • The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
  • This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Fiction

  • Americanah, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Native Son, Richard Wright
  • The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
  • The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  • The Summer We Got Free, Mia McKenzie
  • The Panther in the Hive, Olivia Cole

Know Your Enemy

  • 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond
  • The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — and Divided a Country, Gabriel Sherman
  • Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu

Articles and Reports

  • “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected,” African American Policy Forum
  • “White Privilege:” Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh

Children and Young Adults

  • The Skin I’m In, Sharon G. Flake

Around the Web

  • “The Case for Reparations” Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic 
  • “The Secret History of Guns” Adam Winkler, The Atlantic