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To commemorate Black History Month in 2022, we present a selection of new releases and older books newly added that have landed on our shelves since our 2021 list. These books explore the depth and breadth of the immeasurable contributions made by Black people to the history and culture of the United States. The books below cover literature, art, politics, activism and protest, the performing arts, and more. Children's and Young Adult books selected by our children's librarians are featured below. This is just a very small fraction of what is in the Library's collection, so be sure to click subject links in our catalog records to explore other relevant books.
For more, see our lists from previous years: 2021 | 2020 | 2019. Also check this bibliography of books in our stacks related to the Library's current exhibition, Black Literature Matters. And in 2020, our blog featured "Books for Understanding, Books for Change," which includes still more crucial reading.
HISTORY
- The 1619 Project: a new origin story (edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein) (ebook available)
- Bay, Mia - Traveling Black: a story of race and resistance
- Cashin, Sheryll - White space, black hood: opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality
- The colored conventions movement: Black organizing in the nineteenth century (edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson)
- Commander, Michelle D. - Passages
- Du Bois, W.E.B. - Black reconstruction: an essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880, & other writings (Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor) (new Library of America edition)
- Ellsworth, Scott - The ground breaking: an American city and its search for justice
- Feldman, Noah - The broken constitution: Lincoln, slavery, and the refounding of America
- Flamming, Douglas - Bound for freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America
- Gordon-Reed, Annette - On Juneteenth (ebook available)
- Gosse, Van - The first Reconstruction: Black politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
- Hayes, Christopher - The Harlem uprising: segregation and inequality in postwar New York City
- Healy, Thomas - Soul City: race, equality, and the lost dream of an American utopia
- Holloway, Jonathan Scott - The cause of freedom: a concise history of African Americans
- Holton, Woody - Liberty is sweet: the hidden history of the American Revolution
- The lynching of Emmett Till: a documentary narrative (edited by Christopher Metress)
- Mays, Kyle T. - An Afro-Indigenous history of the United States
- McPherson, James M. - The Negro's Civil War: how American Blacks felt and acted during the war for the Union
- Miles, Tiya - All that she carried: the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
- Painter, Nell Irvin - Creating Black Americans: African-American history and its meanings, 1619 to the present
- Raines, Ben - The last slave ship: the true story of how Clotilda was found, her descendants, and an extraordinary reckoning
Rothman, Joshua D. - The ledger and the chain: how domestic slave traders shaped America- Sims-Wood, Janet L. - Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University: building a legacy of Black history
- Smith, Clint - How the word is passed: a reckoning with the history of slavery across America (ebook available)
- Unsung: unheralded narratives of American slavery & abolition (The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; series editor, Kevin Young; Michelle D. Commander, ed.)
LITERATURE - CRITICISM, HISTORY & ANTHOLOGIES
- Colbert, Soyica Diggs - Radical vision: a biography of Lorraine Hansberry
- Cullen, Countee - My soul's high song: the collected writings of Countee Cullen, voice of the Harlem Renaissance (edited by Gerald Early)
- Delany, Samuel R. - Of solids and surds: notes for Noël Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White
- Douglass, Frederick - The essential Douglass: selected writings & speeches (edited by Nicholas Buccola)
- Dreaming out loud: African American novelists at work (edited by Horace A. Porter)
- George, Lynell - A handful of earth, a handful of sky: the world of Octavia E. Butler
- Griffin, Farah Jasmine - Read until you understand: the profound wisdom of Black life and literature
- Hansberry, Lorraine - Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry (edited by Mollie Godfrey)
- Hurston, Zora Neale - You don't know us negroes: and other essays
- Laymon, Kiese - How to slowly kill yourself and others in America: essays
- Leak, Jeffrey B. - Visible man: the life of Henry Dumas
- Marshall, Paule - Conversations with Paule Marshall (edited by James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway)
- The matter of Black lives: writing from The New Yorker (edited by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick)
- Ransom, Stanley Austin - America's first black poet: Jupiter Hammon of Long Island
- Shields, Charles J. - Lorraine Hansberry: the life behind A raisin in the sun
- There's a revolution outside, my love: letters from a crisis (edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman)
- Toomer, Jean - The letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (edited by Mark Whalan ; with a foreword by Barbara Foley)
Unchained voices: an anthology of Black authors in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century (Vincent Carretta, editor- Wheatley, Phillis - The writings of Phillis Wheatley (edited by Vincent Carretta)
FINE & PERFORMING ARTS
- Abdurraqib, Hanif - A little devil in America: notes in praise of Black performance
- Afro-Atlantic histories (edited by Adriano Pedrosa, Tomás Toledo)
- Gaines, Caseen - Footnotes: the Black artists who rewrote the rules of the Great White Way
- Haygood, Wil - Colorization: one hundred years of Black films in a white world
- Horowitz, Joseph - Dvořák's prophecy: and the vexed fate of Black classical music
- Jenkins, Earnestine - Black artists in America: from the Great Depression to civil rights
- Joseph E. Yoakum: what I saw (edited by Mark Pascale, et al.)
- Rembert, Winfred - Chasing me to my grave: an artist's memoir of the Jim Crow South
- Smith, Wil - Will
- Thurman, Kira - Singing like Germans: Black musicians in the land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
- Tyson, Cicely - Just as I am: a memoir
BIOGRAPHIES & MEMOIRS
- Bagley, Edythe Scott - Desert rose: the life and legacy of Coretta Scott King
- Basevich, Elvira - W.E.B. Du Bois: the lost and the found
- Broome, Brian - Punch me up to the gods
- Burns, Ursula - Where you are is not who you are: a memoir
- Carroll, Rebecca - Surviving the white gaze: a memoir
Clifton, Lucille - Generations: a memoir (introduction by Tracy K. Smith)- Ellingwood, Ken - First to fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the fight for a free press in the age of slavery
- Elliott, Andrea - Invisible child: poverty, survival, & hope in an American city (ebook available)
- Ford, Ashley C. - Somebody's daughter: a memoir
- The Harlem renaissance remembered (essays edited with a memoir by Arna Bontemps)
- James, Kendra - Admissions: a memoir of surviving boarding school
- Johnson, Katherine G. - My remarkable journey: a memoir
- Kashatus, William C. - William Still: The Underground Railroad and the angel at Philadelphia
- Marzorati, Gerald - Seeing Serena
- McGruder, Kevin - Philip Payton: the father of Black Harlem
- Perry, Jeffrey Babcock - Hubert Harrison: the struggle for equality, 1918-1927
- Tubbs, Anna Malaika - The three mothers: how the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin shaped a nation
- Turner, Dawn - Three girls from Bronzeville: a uniquely American memoir of race, fate, and sisterhood
POLITICS & GOVERNMENT, LAW
- African American political thought: a collected history (edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner)
- Chemerinsky, Erwin - Presumed guilty: how the Supreme Court empowered the police and subverted civil rights
- Chisholm, Shirley - Shirley Chisholm: the last interview and other conversations (with an introduction by Representative Barbara Lee)
- Coates, Laura Gayle - Just pursuit: a black prosecutor's fight for fairness
- Harris, Kamala - The truths we hold: an American journey
- Lewis, John - John Lewis: the last interview and other conversations (with an introduction by Jelani Cobb)
- Mills, Charles W. - Black rights/white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism
The Obama portraits (Taína Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard J. Powell, and Kim Sajet)- Riley, Jason - Maverick: a biography of Thomas Sowell
- United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - The essential Kerner Commission report (edited and introduced by Jelani Cobb, with Matthew Guariglia)
RACE RELATIONS, CIVIL RIGHTS, PROTEST & ACTIVISM
- Blain, Keisha N. - Until I am free: Fannie Lou Hamer's enduring message to America
- Boggs, James - Racism and the class struggle: further pages from a black worker's notebook
- Brown-Nagin, Tomiko - Civil rights queen: Constance Baker Motley and the struggle for equality
- Douglas, Deborah D. - U.S. civil rights trail: a traveler's guide to the people, places, and events that made the movement
- Hayes, Robin J. - Love for liberation: African independence, Black Power, and a diaspora underground
- Hinton, Elizabeth Kai, 1983- - America on fire: the untold history of police violence and Black rebellion since the 1960s
- Holt, Thomas C. - The movement: the African American struggle for civil rights
- Kennedy, Randall - Say it loud!: on race, law, history, and culture
- Larson, Kate Clifford - Walk with me: a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
- Lemon, Don - This is the fire: what I say to my friends about racism
- Masur, Kate - Until justice be done: America's first civil rights movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
- Mills, Charles W. - Blackness visible: essays on philosophy and race
- Murch, Donna Jean - Living for the city: migration, education, and the rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
- O'Brien, M.J. - We shall not be moved: the Jackson Woolworth's sit-in and the movement it inspired
- Ransby, Barbara - Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision
- Sullivan, Patricia - Justice rising: Robert Kennedy's America in black and white
- Wilkie, Curtis - When evil lived in Laurel: the "White Knights" and the murder of Vernon Dahmer
WOMEN'S STUDIES
- Bell, Karen Cook - Running from bondage: enslaved women and their remarkable fight for freedom in Revolutionary America
- Burke, Tarana - Unbound: my story of liberation and the birth of the Me Too movement
- Hands on the freedom plow: personal accounts by women in SNCC (edited by Faith S. Holsaert, et al.)
- McKnight, Utz Lars - Frances E. W. Harper: a call to conscience
- Wickenden, Dorothy - The agitators: three friends who fought for abolition and women's rights
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
- Anderson, Laurie Halse - Chains [audiobook download] (print also available)
- Browne, Mahogany L. - Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice
- Browne, Mahogany L. - Woke baby
- Charles, Tami - All because you matter (illustrated by Caldecott Honor winner Bryan Collier)
- Cherry-Paul, Sonja - Stamped (for kids): racism, antiracism, and you (adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul) (audiobook also available)
- Cline-Ransome, Lesa - Overground railroad
- Copeland, Misty - Bunheads
- Doyon, Samara Cole - Magnificent homespun brown: a celebration
- Elliott, Zetta - A place inside of me : a poem to heal the heart
- Grimes, Nikki - Legacy: women poets of the Harlem Renaissance (artwork by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, et al.)
- Hannah-Jones, Nikole - The 1619 Project: born on the water (illustrated by Nikkolas Smith)
- Hudson, Cheryl Willis - Brave, black, first: 50+ African American women who changed the world (illustrations by Erin K. Robinson)
- Johnson, Angela - All different now: Juneteenth, the first day of freedom (illustrated by E.B. Lewis)
- King Neil, Aliya - Keep your head up (pictures by Charly Palmer)
- Krull, Kathleen - Starstruck: the cosmic journey of Neil deGrasse Tyson (with Paul Brewer; illustrated by Frank Morrison)
McDaniel, Breanna J. - Hands up! (illustrated by Shane W. Evans)- Redd, Nancy Amanda - Bedtime bonnet (illustrated by Nneka Myers)
- Slade, Suzanne - Exquisite: the poetry and life of Gwendolyn Brooks (illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera)
- Smith, James Otis - Black heroes of the wild west
- Thompkins-Bigelow, Jamilah - Your name is a song (illustrated by Luisa Uribe)
- Todd, Traci N. - Nina: a story of Nina Simone (pictures by Christian Robinson)
- Walker, Tricia Elam - Nana Akua Goes to School
- Walker, Tricia Elam - Dream Street (collages by Ekua Holmes)
- Weatherford, Carole Boston - Unspeakable: the Tulsa Race Massacre
- Williams, Schele - Your legacy: a bold reclaiming of our enslaved history (illustrated by Tonya Engel)
- Zoboi, Ibi Aanu - The people remember (illustrated by Loveis Wise)
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
- Bayron, Kalynn - This poison heart
- Bryant, Elise - Happily ever afters
- Corthron, Kara Lee - Daughters of jubilation
- Deonn, Tracy - Legendborn
- Dionne, Evette. - Lifting as we climb: Black women's battle for the ballot box
- Iloh, Candice - Every body looking
- Jackson, Kosoko - Yesterday is history
- Johnson, Leah - You should see me in a crown
- Lewis, John - Run. Book one (art by L. Fury with Nate Powell)
Magoon, Kekla - Revolution in our time: the Black Panther Party's promise to the people- Morris, Brittney - Slay
- Okorafor, Nnedi - Akata warrior
- A phoenix first must burn: sixteen stories of black girl magic, resistance, and hope (edited by Patrice Caldwell)
- Reynolds, Jason - Ain't burned all the bright
- Rhodes, Jewell Parker - Paradise on fire (illustrations by Serena Malyon)
- Stone, Nic - Fast pitch
- Thomas, Angie - Concrete rose [e-book] (audiobook also available)
- Williams-Garcia, Rita - A sitting in St. James (audio also available)
- Yoon, Nicola - Instructions for dancing
