Black History

National Books Critics Circle - 2024 Finalist: Autobiography

One of Washington Post's 50 most notable non-fiction books of 2024

The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is an unforgettable travel memoir about the mysterious transformations that may lurk inside us all.

Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own past: his family's difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his own rage and regret. But as it is with all labyrinths, after finding its center, will he come away unscathed, or will he transform into the gripping, fantastical monstrousness that's out to consume him whole?

With nods to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, this surrealist debut memoir takes us into the labyrinth of memory and the monsters lurking there.

Colonial Sudbury, Massachusetts, was designated the Puritan Village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the founding of this quintessential New England town in 1638. Yet this quiet rural village also had a darker history that is often overlooked. Sudbury’s Puritan inhabitants, including some of the most prominent citizens in town, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stories gleaned from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women and children held in bondage, including a court case involving an enslaved boy repeatedly beaten and left scarred by his master less than thirty years after the town’s founding, as well as the bill of sale of Phebey, age two, to a woman in another town. Local author Jane Sciacca uncovers the hidden side of suffering in this New England town.

An inside look at the music born, bred, and perfected in Chicago.

Chicago house music originated in the city’s Black, gay underground in the late seventies and became one of the most popular musical genres in the world by the end of the century. In Chicago House Music: Culture and Community, Marguerite Harrold tells the story of the genre’s rise and the prolific creators who have sustained it for decades. You’ll learn about house music’s early innovators, like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles, who transformed the social and political turmoil around them into a revolution in dance music. You’ll also hear remembrances from contemporary figures in the house community, like DJ Lady D, Avery R. Young, Czboogie and Edgar “Artek” Sinio, who have forged new paths as the genre has evolved. It’s a story about much more than music—it’s about a community struggling for acceptance, love, liberation, and freedom, and about the creative pioneers whose resilience helped turn house music into a worldwide phenomenon.

Full of interviews and first-hand accounts from the people who stood behind the turntables, carried crates of records, or danced until dawn, Chicago House Music is the history of an art form that continues to be a force for social interaction, spiritual liberation, and community today. 

Explore accounts of Oklahoma’s Freedmen as told by their descendants in these stories of resistance and resilience on the Western frontier. The Freedmen of Oklahoma were black people, both enslaved and free, who had been living among the Indian nations. After the official abolition of slavery in 1866, they forged an identity as their own people as they faced the challenges of the western frontier. By 1906, before Oklahoma statehood, over 20,000 people were classified as “Freedmen” from Five Tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole Nations. For decades, their descendants have been rediscovering their family history and restoring its place in the larger narrative. Angela Walton-Raji has compiled this collection of stories, told by descendants from all five tribes, to ensure that the Freedmen of Oklahoma claim their vibrant part of the state’s heritage.

With over a hundred photos collected by G. Faye Dant, and with an introduction by renowned Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin.

When Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, he turned Hannibal, Missouri, into one of the most famous towns in the American imagination. But like Twain’s novel, Hannibal’s idyllic façade often elided the darker racial violence that had marked its past, and it overlooked the history and humanity of the Black residents who have called Hannibal home for generations. Without them, there would be no “America’s hometown.”

In Hannibal’s Invisibles,G. Faye Dant, a Hannibal resident and the executive director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, tells the incredible story of the Black community in this small Missouri town, giving voice to a history that has been marginalized far too long. Hear first-hand accounts from those who survived enslavement, faced racism after emancipation, endured Jim Crow, and contributed to the triumphs of the civil rights movement. These are the stories of Black doctors, entrepreneurs, and teachers who helped uplift the community, and remembrances of the countless individuals who gave richness and meaning to Hannibal’s everyday life. The vintage photographs and historical documents collected here are a celebration of these resilient people who built and sustained this corner of the Midwest, despite the immense obstacles they met at every turn. 

Death on the Turnpike

Discover the bloody story of John Wesley Wable's 1950s killing spree that rocked Western Pennsylvania, and left truckers and drivers alike frightened of the turnpike. After a series of murdered truck drivers and a high-speed interstate chase, Wable's gruesome criminal story also involves a thrilling court case and unresolved mysteries to do this day.

Author Richard Gazarik details the incredible true crime narratives of the man dubbed the "Pennsylvania Turnpike Phantom Killer."

Vivian Gibson's bestselling memoir of growing up in the 1950s in a segregated St. Louis neighborhood has been hailed by critics as a spare, elegant jewel of a work and a love letter to Gibson's childhood.

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as progress. A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson's large family―her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father―and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibson's words, This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl―a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.

Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

Cincinnati played a large part in creatng a refuge for escaped salaves and in the Underground Railroad movement.

Nearly a century after the American Revolution, the waters of the Ohio River provided a real and complex barrier for the United States to navigate. While this waterway was a symbol of freedom and equality for thousands of enslaved black Americans who had escaped from the horrible institution of enslavement, the Ohio River was also used to transport thousands of slaves down the river to the Deep South. Due to Cincinnati's location on the banks of the river, the city's economy was tied to the slave society in the South. However, a special cadre of individuals became very active in the quest for freedom undertaken by African American fugitives on their journeys to the North. Thanks to spearheading by this group of Cincinnatian trailblazers, the ""Queen City"" became a primary destination on the Underground Railroad, the first multiethnic, multiracial, multiclass human-rights movement in the history of the United States.

Fear, rumor and white supremacist ideals clashed with an unprecedented labor action spawned an epic tragedy.

On November 23, 1887, white vigilantes gunned down unarmed black laborers and their families due to strikes on Louisiana sugar cane plantations. A future member of the U.S. House of Representatives was among the leaders of a mob that routed black men from houses and forced them to a stretch of railroad track, ordering them to run for their lives before gunning them down. According to a witness, the guns firing in the black neighborhoods sounded like a battle. Author and award-winning reporter John DeSantis uses correspondence, interviews and federal records to detail this harrowing true story.

Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Honoree

From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.

Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole.

A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.

Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.

The state, though, was not immune to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the first half of the twentieth century. Former vaudevillians Arthur H. Bell and his wife used the tactics of public theater to advertise and recruit for the organization. At a massive riot in Perth Amboy, thousands of immigrants besieged a few hundred Klansmen, tossed them out of building windows, burned their cars and ran them out of town. The allying of pro-Nazi German Bund groups and the Klan in the lead-up to World War II marked the end of the Klan's foothold. Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.

By the late 20th century, Montpelier, the home of James and Dolley Madison, had been altered until it would no longer have been recognizable to the couple.

In 2000 the newly-created Montpelier Foundation took over management of the historic home with the seemingly insurmountable task of restoring it to be a visual record of the Madisons' era. Within ten years, the Foundation overcame numerous hurdles, turning Montpelier into a monument to the Father of the Constitution. Over the next decade the site also became a monument to Montpelier's enslaved. The buildings in their community next to the Madisons' home were reconstructed, and award-winning exhibits dramatically illustrate the tragedy of slavery and essential role of enslaved people in Madison's life.

Foundation co-founder William H. Lewis details the nonprofit's ambitious preservation projects and remarkable achievements.

African Americans have made rich contributions to Florida throughout its history in all avenues of public and private life, from education, to business, to politics, a keystone of which was the ability to own and sell property. Author Jada Wright-Greene showcases this legacy through historic photographs of black American's homes, detailing the lives of the people who lived in them through engaging narrative.

On February 5th, 1946, the Ferguson brothers were concluding a night out celebrating Charles Ferguson's reenlistment in the Army...

Charles, wearing his military uniform, walked with his brothers Alphonso, Joseph, and Richard towards the Freeport Bus Terminal to go home. A provisional Freeport police officer named Joseph Romeika stopped the brothers over a disorderly conduct complaint. Words were exchanged, and Officer Romeika killed Charles, Alphonso and shot Joseph within minutes of the initial stop. Following the unarmed shooting, Romeikia was acquitted despite changing stories of eyewitnesses.

Discover how the shooting became a catalyst for civil rights efforts and immortalized in a Woody Guthrie protest song.

Longlisted for the 2022 PEN America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, a riveting and tightly argued history of eugenics and its ripple effects, by acclaimed historian Elizabeth Catte.

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia’s eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, it was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling “troublesome” women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got?

“Grounded, well-rendered, and highly disturbing,” Pure America is another necessary corrective to the historical record, a must-read for anyone concerned with how to repair its damage.

Surveying the sensational newspaper accounts as events unfolded, author and historian Chris Flook recounts this grisly tale of political intrigue and conspiracy.

In the fall of 1902, Indianapolis police uncovered a prolific graverobbing ring operating across the city. At the time, cemeteries across central Indiana were relieved of their dead by ghouls, as they were called, seeking fresh corpses desperately needed by the city's medical colleges. The ring was also accused of multiple murders. In Hamilton County, a former Confederate soldier named Wade West delivered stolen corpses by floating them down the White River. His counterpart in Indianapolis, Rufus Cantrell, an itinerant preacher and full-time graverobber known as the "King of the Ghouls," ransacked Indy's cemeteries for years before being caught.

During World War II, no American city suffered a worse housing shortage than Detroit, and no one suffered that shortage more than the city's African American citizens.

In 1941, the federal government began constructing the Sojourner Truth Housing Project in northeast Detroit to house 200 black war production workers and their families. Almost immediately, whites in the neighborhood vehemently protested. On February 28, 1942, a confrontation between black tenants and white protesters erupted in a riot that sent at least 40 to the hospital and more than 220 to jail. This confrontation was the precursor to the bloodiest race riot of the war just sixteen months later.

Gerald Van Dusen, author of 2020 Michigan Notable Books nominee Detroit's Birwood Wall, unfolds the background and events of this overlooked moment in Motor City history.

The true story of Marshall Major Taylor, who overcame racial prejudice to become one of the most dominant cyclists in history. Part of Belt's Revival series and with an introduction by Zito Madu.

The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World, which Taylor self-published in 1928, gives a riveting first-person account of his rise to the highest echelons of professional cycling. Born in Indianapolis, he eventually became the first African American cycling world champion, going on to set seven world records in the sport.

Readers will learn about Taylor's exploits as an athlete, including his early taste of success in a grueling six-day race, his unparalleled dominance as a sprinter, and some of his most bitter defeats. But the man who achieved international fame as the Black Cyclone also details the extreme prejudice he faced both on and off the track. It's a story about one of the greatest athletes in American history but also a moving testament to Taylor's resilience and determination in the face of overt racism and seemingly impossible odds.

As he tells us himself, I am writing my memoirs . . . in the spirit calculated to solicit simple justice, equal rights, and a square deal for the posterity of my down-trodden but brave people, not only in athletic games and sports, but in every honorable game of human endeavor.

Prior to the Civil War, thousands escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. Untold others failed in the attempt.

These unfortunate souls were dragged into bondage via the Reverse Underground Railroad, as it came to be called. With more lines on both roads than any other state, the Free State of Ohio became a hunting ground for slavecatchers and kidnappers who roamed the North with impunity, seeking “fugitives” or any person of color who could be sold into slavery. And when they found one, they would kidnap their victim and head south to reap the reward.

David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker, authors of Historic Black Settlements of Ohio, reveal not only the terror and injustice but also the bravery and determination born of this dark time in American history.

Seen on the roadways of Charleston County and in museums and galleries worldwide, handmade sweetgrass baskets have been crafted in the Christ Church Parish of Mount Pleasant, SC for more than 300 years.

An ancient African art, sweetgrass basket making utilizes sweetgrass, bullrush, pine needles, and palm leaves to create unique, handmade pieces. Traditionally, artisans use a piece of the rib bone of a cow and a pair of scissors as their only tools for construction. When English settlers founded Christ Church Parish in the late 1600s, they saw a place rich in natural beauty and ideal for harvesting rice, cotton, and indigo. Skilled agricultural laborers were needed, and consequently, South Carolina became the top importer of enslaved West Africans. Finding a landscape similar to their homeland, those who came kept many of their traditional practices. Today, the richness of the West African presence can be seen in Charleston's architecture, basketry, and ironworks.

February 22, 1960, bore witness to an event that would forever change the social, political, and economic life of a city, a state, and millions of inhabitants.

The arrest of 34 Virginia Union University students during a sit-in protest at the most upscale department store in Richmond, Virginia, heralded the upending of a long-established way of life and a change of direction from which there would be no turning back. The students would see their actions galvanize a community into effecting wide-ranging reforms in desegregation and play a significant role in ending the nearly 70-year grip on power of one of the nation’s strongest political machines. Bafflingly, their achievement faded into obscurity, and only in recent years has its importance been recognized.

Dr. Kimberly A. Matthews is a professor of leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Matthews earned her doctorate in education at Virginia Commonwealth University (2012) and began teaching with Virginia Commonwealth University’s LEAD living-learning program. She is the author of a history of the Richmond Crusade for Voters. Dr. Raymond Pierre Hylton is professor of history at Virginia Union University. Dr. Hylton earned his doctorate in history at the University College Dublin, Ireland (1986), and first taught at Virginia Union as an adjunct instructor in 1988. He became a full-time faculty member in 1991 and served as dean and department chair. He is the author of a History of Virginia Union University.

Author Brian Armstrong tells the shocking story of this "sundown town" and how it evolved into the diverse community that exists today.

On March 1, 1894, two African American men broke into a home in rural Franklin Park and murdered a white woman and her daughter before her husband fought and killed the attackers. The newspapers called it the "Franklin Park Tragedy," and the story captivated public attention nationally and abroad. Another tragedy came afterward, with the racist forced expulsion of many local African American residents.