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| Photo Credit: Kaitlyn Veto |
Left Bank Books, an independent bookstore in Saint Louis, Missouri responded to the Ferguson protests with “a community curated list of books that explore race” in the United States. That project, known as Black Lives Matter:A Reading List is available for download in PDF format.
Interested in checking out a few books from the list? Here are some of the titles available at UB:
Civil Rights History
- Lynching of Cleo Wright by Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. (ebook)
- Contempt of Court: The Turn‐of‐the‐Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism by Mark Curriden (Law Library)
- Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration by Margaret Garb (ebook)
- The Fire Next Time (In Collected Essays) by James Baldwin
- American Slavery, American Freedomby Edmund S. Morgan
- A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls Lanier
- Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 by William Tuttle
Contemporary Civil Rights Issues
- Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson
- The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why by Jabari Asim
- Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
- The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues by Angela Y. Davis (ebook)
- The House That Race Built edited by Wahneema Lubiano
- The News: A User’s Manual by Alain De Botton
- The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Mat Taibbi
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
- Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class by Ian Haney‐Lopez (ebook)
Memoir
- The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
Novels and Stories Exploring Race
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (Law Library)
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- King Hedley II by August Wilson
Policing and Incarceration
- Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko (e-book)
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
- Arbitrary Justice by Angela J. Davis (Law Library)
See something you’d like to read from Left Bank that we don’t own? Request it through Interlibrary Loan.
What additional books would you add to the list?
[Updated 3/3/15] Additions based on suggestions from our readers:
- The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia J Williams
- Killing Rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by by Jr. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah
I would definitely add The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams, anything by bell hooks,nearly anything by Lisa Delpit, many of the novels by Toni Morrison, poems by Morgan Parker, poems by Danez Smith, +++++.