Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Examines the events and forces leading up to 1919 race riots in Chicago. (description provided by publisher)

A history of racist and antiracist ideas in America, from their roots in Europe until today, adapted from the National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning. (Description from catalog)

In 1954, one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth Century aimed to end school segregation in the United States. (description from catalog)

Presents an account of the 1944 civil rights protest involving hundreds of African-American Navy servicemen who were unjustly charged with mutiny for refusing to work in unsafe conditions after the deadly Port Chicago explosion. (Description from catalog.)

Here is the riveting dual biography of two little-known but extraordinary men in Civil War history George E. Stephens and James Henry Gooding. These Union soldiers not only served in the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, the well-known black regiment, but were also war correspondents who published eyewitness reports of the battlefields. (description from catalog)

On Easter Sunday of 1873, just eight years after the Civil War ended, a band of white supremacists marched into Grant Parish, Louisiana, and massacred over one hundred unarmed African Americans. Lawrence Goldstone traces the evolution of the law and the fascinating characters involved in the story of how the Supreme Court helped institutionalize racism in the American justice system" (description provided by publisher)

"In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history."--Provided by publisher.

A comprehensive history of anti-black racism focuses on the lives of five major players in American history, including Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson, and highlights the debates that took place between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. (Description from catalog)

A Black Women's History of the United States is a critical survey of black women's complicated legacy in America, as it takes into account their exploitation and victimization as well as their undeniable and substantial contributions to the country since its inception.

The Nation Must Awake, published for a wide audience for the first time, is Parrish’s first-person account, along with the recollections of dozens of others, compiled immediately following the tragedy under the name Events of the Tulsa Race Disaster. With meticulous attention to detail that transports readers to those fateful days, Parrish documents the magnitude of the loss of human life and property at the hands of white vigilantes. The testimonies shine light on Black residents’ bravery and the horror of seeing their neighbors gunned down and their community lost to flames. (Description from Amazon)

Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. (Description from catalog.)

The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War. (Description from NoveList.)

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America. (Description from NoveList.)

'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves." (Description from catalog)

One of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders, a bestselling author, community organizer, investigative journalist, Ivy League professor, and former head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous draws from a life lived on America's racial fault line to deliver a series of gripping and lively parables that call on each of us to reconcile, heal, and work fearlessly to make America one nation. Never Forget Our People Were Always Free illuminates for each of us how the path to healing America's broken heart starts with each of us having the courage to heal our own.
(Description from catalog)

A surviving original Freedom Rider recounts his firsthand experiences with the South's historical and ongoing resistance to racial equality, sharing insights into what is required for progressive change to become possible in America. (Description from NoveList)

Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond's Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today's activists in the era of Black Lives Matter. (Description from catalog)

When a class-action lawsuit against the US government results in a billion dollar settlement for the aggrieved parties, you’d expect the story to be headline news...So why then have so many people never heard of Pigford vs. Glickman? In Just Harvest, Francis narrates the dramatic twists and turns of the legal battle fought and won, and evidences the many years of ingrained discrimination and racism that preceded it.

Describes the group of African-Americans that joined the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, forming the Black Cabinet, who worked to devise and recommend solutions to the exclusion and racism they faced as part of the New Deal. (Description from NoveList.)

Examines the struggle of African American women to achieve equality and political power by examining the lives and work of black women, including Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Fannie Lou Hamer. (Description from NoveList)

In 1955, Emmett Till was lynched when he was 14 years old. That remains an undisputed fact of the case that ignited a flame within the civil rights movement that has yet to be extinguished. Yet the rest of the details surrounding the case remain distorted by time and too many tellings. What does justice mean in the resolution of a 66 year-old cold case?
(Description from catalog)

Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the "welfare queen" myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day.
(Description from catalog)

The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. (Description from catalog)

Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives would never be the same. (Description from catalog)

An investigation into how racial inequality has shaped the heart transplant race describes how in 1968 an injured black man checked into a hospital before his heart was removed and donated without his family's knowledge or consent. (Description from catalog.)

Based on new research, this is the story of how Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller, and barnstorming introduced integrated baseball to America. (Description from catalog)

Against the backdrop of ongoing massive resistance to racial desegregation and calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder. Young Black players were blamed for the chaos in the NBA, citing drugs, violence, greed, and criminality. The supposed decline of pro basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of integration in America: the rules had changed, allowing more Black people onto a formerly white playing field, and now they were ruining everything. 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.
(Description from catalog)

Now a documentary narrated by Common, produced by Grant Hill, Dwyane Wade, and 9th Wonder, from filmmaker Mary Mazzio The moving true story of a group of young men growing up on Chicago's West side who form the first all-black high school rowing team in the nation, and in doing so not only transform a sport, but their lives. (Description from catalog.)

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a stunning meditation on ritual and collectiveness that explores how older forms of inquiry-from song to prayer to ways of public gathering-might help us all survive violent times and address America's shared history.
(Description from catalog)

The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the "Good War" fought by the "Greatest Generation."
(Description from catalog)

Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur "genius" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture. Together, their work shows how the tendrils of 1619--of slavery and resistance to slavery--reach into every part of our contemporary culture, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship.

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans.
(Description from Amazon)

2019 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas - and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines - historians and artists, journalists and novelists - each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America. (Description from NoveList)

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming the center of Black life in the West. But on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood. They laid waste to 35 blocks and murdering as many as 300 people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst acts of racist violence in United States history. The Goodwin's and many of their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into "a Mecca," in Ed's words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts.
(Description from catalog)

A “beautiful, tragic, and inspiring” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish…and others to falter. (Description from Amazon)

An historical and imaginative tour-de-force, WAKE brings to light for the first time the existence of enslaved black women warriors, whose stories can be traced by carefully scrutinizing historical records; and where the historical record goes silent, WAKE reconstructs the likely past of two female rebels, Adono and Alele, on the slave ship The Unity. (Description from catalog)