Black History Books

W.e.b. DuBois by Daniel Levering Lewis; race rebels by Robin DC Kelley, “Sojourner Truth” Nell Irvin Painter, Aristocrats of Color by Willard Gatewood, narrative of Frederick Douglass,

Try the biography of Alain Locke.

You might look at the arts, William H. Johnson was a very good artist and his story extremely interesting. He moved to France in the 20s, where he became a modernist. He came back to the US and received a grant from the Harmon Foundation and returned to Europe where he married his Danish wife. His life had a lot of tragedy and loss, and later there was a lawsuit after his death about the ownership of his artwork. There's more information on Wikipedia.

“Hutch” by Charlotte Breese, “Up from Slavery” by Booker T. Washington, the “Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Aren’t I A Woman” by Deborah Gray White, “ Trouble in Mind: African Americans and Race Reflections from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement,” by Leon Litwack, “The Slave Ship” by Markus Rediker, and the classic overview is John Hope Franklin, “From Slavery to Freedom.”

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself" by Harriet A. Jacobs

This isn't a book but I highly recommend this 1995 project by Jeffrey E. Smith, Ph.D.

....

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" is a good, though somewhat short read. It's about a very young woman who rejected the advances of her "Master," and therefore suffered the consequences. She escaped by living for years, and years in the attic crawl space of her grandmother's shack. True story.

.....and this book - it was very, very interesting.

I got a sort of comprehensive history called "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It was quite good, lots of pictures, too.

BTW - there are some very interesting discussions in past DL threads about gays and slavery. For instance, here's one.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" and "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson