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American Studies at Leicester

Black Lives Matter

Academics in the Centre for American Studies have put together a list of resources for anyone interested in learning more about the Black Lives Matter movement. This list is not exhaustive but it offers a useful starting point for further reading.

The Centre is committed to anti-racist, inclusive learning, teaching, and research – many of the items on this list are drawn from our current module reading lists.

We affirm that Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter mural in Charlotte, NC.

Black Lives Matter mural in Charlotte, NC. Source: David A. Thrower | @7Hangtime on Instagram

Immediate materials for understanding the Black Lives Matter Movement

  • Isaac Chatiner, ,The New Yorker
  • Alicia Garza, "" (2014)
  • Angela Davis, '' (2020)
  • Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019)
  • Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
  • Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist (2019).
  • Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018)
  • Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (2017)
  • Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People Âé¶¹ÊÓÆµ Race (2017)
  • German Lopez, , Vox.com,
  • Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter (2017)
  • DeRay Mckesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: Race and Justice in a Divided America (2019)
  • Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality (2020)
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
  • Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016)
  • , The Ezra Klein Show,

Fiction

  • James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)
  • James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)
  • Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
  • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
  • Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)
  • Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (1934)
  • Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
  • T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville (2015)
  • William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer (1962)
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
  • Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
  • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye: A Novel (1970)
  • Ann Petry, The Street (1946)
  • Kylie Reid, Such a Fun Age (2019)
  • Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
  • Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)
  • Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (2019)
  • Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

Non-Fiction

  • Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
  • James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
  • Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
  • Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (2018)
  • Toni Morrison,""(2016)
  • Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1988)
  • Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
  • Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013)
  • Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)

Films and Television Shows

  • 12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013)
  • 13th (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2016)
  • Atlanta (Donald Glover, 2016-)
  • Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018)
  • black-ish (Kenya Barris, 2014-)
  • BlacKkKlansman (dir. Spike Lee, 2018)
  • Boyz n the Hood (dir. John Singleton, 1991)
  • Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991)
  • Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1989)
  • Fruitvale Station (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2013)
  • Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017)
  • I Am Not Your Negro (Roaul Peck, 2016)
  • If Beale Street Could Talk (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2018)
  • Killer of Sheep (dir. Charles Burnett, 1978)
  • Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2016)
  • One False Move (dir. Carl Franklin, 1992)
  • Pose (Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, Steven Canals, 2018-)
  • Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014)

Poetry and Drama

  • Jericho Brown, The Tradition (2019)
  • Jericho Brown, “” (2020)
  • Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), SOS: Poems 1961-2013 (2016)
  • Gwendolyn Brooks, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (2014), Selected Poems (2006)
  • Lucille Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (2012)
  • Lucille Clifton, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (2020)
  • Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (2020)
  • Wanda Coleman, The Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors (2011)
  • Countee Cullen, Collected Poems (2014)
  • Rita Dove, Collected Poems (2016)
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (2018)
  • Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
  • Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (2000)
  • Robert Hayden, Collected Poems (2013)
  • Terrence Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (2018)
  • Terrence Hayes, “” (2020)
  • Angela Jackson, All these Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (1997)
  • June Jordan, Directed by Desire (2005)
  • Etheridge Knight, The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986)
  • Yusef Komunyakaa, The Emperor of Water Clocks (2015)
  • Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993)
  • Langston Hughes, Selected/Collected Poems (various edition)
  • Clarence Major, From Now On: New and Selected Poems 1970-2015 (2015)
  • Clarence Major, ed. The Garden Thrives: 20th Century African-American Poetry (1996)
  • Claude McKay, Complete Poems (2008)
  • Aja Monet, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (2017)
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
  • Claudia Rankine, “” (2020)
  • Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2011)
  • Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (2012)
  • Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead: Poems (2017)
  • Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings (2002)
  • August Wilson, Fences (1985)

Podcasts and Music

  • 1619 (Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, 2019)
  • 2Pac, Strictly 4 MY N.I.G.G.A.Z.(1993)
  • The Hereafter (produced by Eve Tuck)
  • Beyonce, Lemonade (2016)
  • Che Lingo, “My Block” (2020)
  • Childish Gambino, This is America (2018)
  • Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues” (1971)
  • Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
  • N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton (1988)
  • YG, “FTP” (2020)

Understanding Black Women’s History

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (2014)
  • Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women's History of the United States (2020)
  • B. Collier-Thompson & V.P. Franklin, Sisters in Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (2001)
  • Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (1981)
  • Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The struggle over woman suffrage and black suffrage in Reconstruction America (2011)
  • Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984)
  • bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989)
  • bell hooks, ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism (1981)
  • Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
  • Morgan Jerkins, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America (2018)
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)
  • R. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (1998)
  • Emily West, Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation (2014)
  • Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)

Histories of Policing and Punishment in the United States

  • Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)
  • Gloria Browne-Marshall, Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present (2007)
  • Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
  • Shaun Gabbidon and Helen Greene, Race, Crime, and Justice: a Reader (2005)
  • Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016)
  • (2015)
  • Leonard Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (2010)
  • Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010)
  • Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

Abolition and Civil Rights

  • Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (1988)
  • Clayborne Carson, In Struggle (1981)
  • James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America (1991)
  • David Doddington, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (2018)
  • Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (2000)
  • John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement (1994)
  • Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham (1997)
  • Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
  • Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America (1987)
  • Glenn Feldman [ed.], Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004)
  • David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (1986)
  • Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and its Legacy (2015)
  • Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (March 2005)
  • Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (2007)
  • Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010)
  • Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (1992)
  • M.J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004)
  • Steven Lawson, Black Ballots (1976)
  • Steven Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics (1985)
  • George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (2006)
  • Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies [eds.] From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012)
  • Howell Raines [ed.] My Soul is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (1977)
  • Belinda Robnett, How long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (1997)
  • James Patterson, Brown vs. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001)
  • Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016)
  • Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (2010)
  • Tim Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999)
  • William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon (1992)
  • Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain [eds.], Long is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (2009)
  • Thomas Wagstaff, Black Power (1969)
  • Clive Webb [ed.] Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (2005)
  • Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun (2007)
  • Gary Younge, No Place Like Home (1999)
  • Gary Younge, Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (2006)
  • Gary Younge, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016)

Race and Latin America

  • George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America (2004)
  • Herman L. Bennet, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009)
  • Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back (any edition)
  • Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo Garofalo (eds), Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the early modern Ibero-Atlantic World (2009)

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