16 of the Best Black History Books

In this unforgettable meditation on women and love, Lorde pioneered the genre she called biomythography: an evocative blend of history, biography, and mythmaking. Lorde poignantly recounts moving through the world as an outsider, a queer Black woman longing for the unknown home of her West Indian parents. Tracing her youth in the bohemian lesbian bar scene circa 1950s New York, Lorde illuminates how the love of women saved her, chasing away her loneliness to leave a renewed wellspring of humanity, identity and community. In these lyrical pages, Lorde goes from lost to found, writing, “Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me.”

History is a living wound in Jazz, a sensuous masterpiece that hopscotches through time from the Great Migration to the Harlem Renaissance. The novel opens with a funeral where Violet, a middle-aged New Yorker, mutilates the corpse of teenaged Dorcas, the lover and murder victim of her unfaithful husband, Joe. From that inflection point of passion and brutality, Morrison looks backward into the past, exploring how the nation’s reprehensible inheritance of racism and colorism informs Black urban life. Morrison’s language, evocative and sensually stylized as ever, shapes the novel like a jazz arrangement, with the solo voices of ancillary characters blotting out the mysterious narrator, then coalescing to form a mellifluous symphony. Masterfully constructed from history, legend, and myth, Jazz locates humanity within tragedy, birthing a bittersweet love story from the ashes of suffering.

In her much-lauded masterwork, Hurston lyrically captures one woman’s lifelong search for independence and self-actualization, tracing her journey through three tumultuous marriages and an ultimate return to her Florida roots. In Janie Crawford, Hurston’s indomitable protagonist, we see the forebearer of Toni Morrison’s Sethe and Alice Walker’s Celie. Hurston’s prose approaches the sublime, blending luscious poetry with southern vernacular, earning her the title that has long stuck to her name: “Genius of the South.” Though Hurston’s work slid into obscurity for decades, Their Eyes Were Watching God now looms rightfully large in the American canon, enduring in the hearts of readers as an unforgettable story of a vibrant Black woman determined to choose her own destiny. 

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of Between the World and Me, a lyrical, landmark meditation on Blackness in contemporary America, and the book that announced the arrival of Ta-Nehisi Coates as a once-in-a-generation talent. In a luminous epistolary voice, Coates shares painful, radical truths with his fifteen-year-old son, speaking powerfully about the racist violence baked into American culture. Ever since Between the World and Me, Coates’ status as a major writer and thinker—one of our last true public intellectuals—has been undeniable.

In this masterpiece of epic, Steinbeckian scale, woven in an ageless voice brimming with lyricism and folk wisdom, Wilkerson chronicles The Great Migration, a decades-long exodus of Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West. Drawing on a staggering volume of research, including over a thousand interviews and newly released public records, Wilkerson chronicles a national movement through the grueling journeys of three subjects, who risked everything to put down roots far from home. Through their food, faith, and culture, these migrants shaped American cities in their own image, transforming them into the vibrant places where we live today. In these towering, compulsively readable pages, Wilkerson makes visible the “unrecognized immigration” that has shaped our modern nation. 

“’The world is before you,’ I want to tell my daughters,” writes Edwidge Danticat in this blistering collection, “’and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.’” In these galvanizing essays and poems, framed as a response to James Baldwin’s seminal 1963 collection, The Fire Next Time, some of the most preeminent Black intellectuals of Ward’s generation shine a light into the state of race in America. In her introduction, Ward tasks each writer with examining “the ugly truths that plague us in this country”; the writers anthologized here explore such subjects as white rage, walking while Black, public mourning, and national amnesia over slavery, among other topics. With searing new work from Claudia Rankine, Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Wilkerson, Kiese Laymon, and more, this anthology demands that the country confront the stains of racism baked into so much of American life. 

“I spent my life arguing how I mattered until it didn’t matter,” writes Smith in this radiant, combustive collection of poems, wherein they confront the myriad forms of violence America visits on the bodies and souls of Black people. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with “summer, somewhere,” a gutting poem imagining an afterlife for the Black men murdered by police officers; Smith goes on to write about living with an HIV positive diagnosis, while also celebrating the joy and eroticism of queer love. Woven through with beauty, brutality, and heartbreak, this collection is an unmissable achievement from a singular poetic talent.

In his searing, fearless memoir, Laymon tells the story of his body, from his adolescent obesity to his early experiences of sexual violence to the racist politicization of Black bodies in America. Writing to and for his mother, Laymon recounts his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, where his brilliant but struggling single mother was the center of his world, embracing him with one arm and beating him with the other. Throughout his journey to become a college professor, Laymon wrestled with disordered eating and body dysmorphia; meanwhile, shame, confusion, and trauma inhibited his ability to form healthy relationships. These haunted pages illuminate how systemic failures give rise to personal traumas, yet all of it is threaded through with complicated, enduring tenderness for the places and people who made Laymon.

Originally published in 1982, this indispensable volume revolutionized women’s studies; as Audre Lorde described the book’s impact, it was “the beginning of a new era, where the ‘women’ in women’s studies will no longer mean ‘white.’” But Some of Us Are Brave confronts the absence of Black feminist scholarship in women’s studies, demanding a more robust intersectional feminism, while also challenging racism and advocating for Black female scholars to have their rightful place in the social sciences. With contributions by Alice Walker, Michele Wallace, and dozens of other distinguished writers, But Some of Us Are Brave remains an invaluable resource, even decades after its publication. 

In this big-hearted young adult novel authored by last year’s winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, we meet a beguiling protagonist for the ages: Felix, an artistic transgender Black teen, who dreams of a great love story while fearing he’ll never meet The One. At a prestigious summer arts program, Felix is devastated when an anonymous bully publicizes pre-transition photos of him, captioned with his deadname. His catfishing revenge plot sends him down a path of questioning and self-discovery, all punctuated by falling in love for the first time. Overflowing with heartfelt teen firsts, like forgiveness, heartbreak, and self-discovery, Felix Ever After excavates the messy glories of love, both for others and for ourselves. 

In this comprehensive scholarly analysis, Farmer challenges long-held misconceptions about the role of women in the Black Power movement, complicating the assumption that sexism routinely sidelined female activists. Farmer depicts the radical strides these women made in dismantling racism, sexism, and classism, while also illustrating how that radical activism has continued to reverberate in the decades since. Through a rigorous multimedia analysis encompassing artwork, political cartoons, and manifestos, Farmer illuminates just how essential the women of the Black Power movement were, tracing their efforts in decades past to the continued centrality of Black women in the fight for social justice.

Written with the fierce, blistering sensuality characteristic of his poetry, this bracing memoir of Jones’ coming-of-age follows his serpentine journey of self-discovery, from unrequited lust to furtive sexual encounters to hurtful censure from loved ones. Jones recounts growing up as a queer Black boy in Texas, where his family preferred not to have its secrets spoken aloud, but where the influences of his mother and grandmother shaped him profoundly. In these laser-sharp pages, Jones examines the fraught intersection between race and queerness, making for a layered meditation on self-actualization that’s at once tender and brutal.

In this National Book Award-winning novel, one of our finest storytellers unspools the miraculous story of Esch, a pregnant, motherless teenager living in generational poverty with her three brothers and her hard-drinking father. As Hurricane Katrina barrels toward their ramshackle home in coastal Mississippi, it’s the tender, sinewy bonds of family that rescue these characters from the storm. Viscerally crafted and soaked to its loamy bones in Southern Gothic sorrow, this novel is at once a poignant study of a dispossessed girl stepping into motherhood and a lyrical portrait of Black life in the rural south. Ward writes of Esch, “She made things happen that had never happened before.” The same could be said of Ward, who volcanically reinvents what the novel can do and be with her every publication. 

Raw, racy, and utterly mesmerizing, Luster marks the arrival of a major new voice in American letters. Twenty-something Edie is drifting ever closer to self-destruction; after losing her dead-end admin job in a publishing office rife with racism and misogyny, she turns to delivering takeout by bike in order to make the rent on her squalid Bushwick apartment, where she spends her nights growing in fits and starts in her development as a painter. Meanwhile, she’s sleeping with a much-older man in an open marriage, whose carefully constructed boundaries come crashing down when his enigmatic wife invites a destitute Edie to stay in their suburban home. There Edie meets Akila, the couple’s recently adopted Black daughter, to whom Edie grows close when she realizes that she may be the only Black woman in this young teenager’s life. Leilani brings painterly precision and biting humor to a feverish novel where each pyrotechnic sentence is a joy to experience. Dreamlike, tender, and big-hearted, Luster is a must-read from an immeasurably talented young writer.

In Homegoing, Gyasi masterfully maneuvered a multi-generational story through three hundred years of Ghanaian and American history; in her sophomore effort, Transcendent Kingdom, she narrows her narrative scope without sacrificing any of her storytelling heft. Gyasi’s inimitable protagonist is Gifty, a neuroscience PhD candidate studying depression and addiction. Gifty’s research hits close to home, as she’s seeking to solve the suffering in her own family, shattered by her brother’s fatal drug overdose and her mother’s subsequent bottomless depression. As she searches for meaning in meaningless tragedy, Gifty questions the evangelical faith she was raised in, making for a powerful novel about the push and pull between science and spirituality, as well as a heartbreaking meditation on the ties that bind. 

This slim, spectacular novel, told in searing vignettes, is the story of Thandi, the Pennsylvania-born daughter of a South African mother and an American father, who moves through the world as “a strange in-betweener”—caught between Black and white, American and not. Clemmons masterfully traces Thandi’s becoming, from awakening to her privileges to grieving her mother’s death to becoming a mother herself. Through Thandi’s gripping, intimate thoughts, Clemmons shapes a masterful meditation on biracial identity, while also evoking bittersweet insights about the relationship between love and loss.