Fiction, Biography/Memoir, Poetry and Drama
James Baldwin
Nobody Knows My Name
Notes of a Native Son
The Fire Next Time
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Felon
Claude Brown
Manchild in the Promised Land
Octavia Butler
Kindred
Parable of the Sower
Bloodchild and Other Stories
Aimé Césaire
A Tempest
Charles W. Chesnutt
The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Water Dancer
Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet
Between the World and Me
Edwidge Danticat
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
Tananarive Due
Blood Colony
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
Shadow and Act
Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin in the Sun
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Mitchel S. Jackson
Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family
Marlon James
Black Leopard, Red Wolf
N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season
Charles Johnson
Middle Passage
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
Silver Sparrow
Jamaica Kincaid
Annie John
The Autobiography of My Mother
“Girl” (short story)
Toni Morrison
Beloved
The Bluest Eye
Song of Solomon
Jazz
Albert Murray
The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy
Ben Okri
The Famished Road
Tales of Freedom
Kwanza Osajyefo
Black
Claudia Rankine
Citizen
Alice Walker
The Color Purple
Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad
The Nickel Boys
John Edgar Wideman
Brothers and Keepers
Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society
Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File
Richard Wright:
Black Boy
Native Son
Malcolm X (with Alex Haley)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Anthologies
Henry Louis Gates Jr., gen. ed.
The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature
Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, eds.
Vintage Book of African-American Poetry
Alain Locke and Arnold Rampersad
The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance
Children’s Picture Books
Kwame Alexander & Kadir Nelson
The Undefeated
Jacqueline Woodson
The Other Side
Critical Race Studies / Antiracist Studies and Related Literary Criticism
Elizabeth Alexander
“The Trayvon Generation” from The New Yorker
Michelle Alexander
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Carol Anderson
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Anne Anlin Cheng
The Melancholy of Race
Ta-Nehisi Coates
“The Case for Reparations”
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Brittany Cooper
Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women
Kimberle Crenshaw
Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines
Angela Davis
The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk
Glory Edim (ed.)
Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves
Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
James Forman Jr.
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
George Fredrickson
Racism: A Short History
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
Paula Giddings
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
Paul Gilroy
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Sharon Harley (ed.)
Sister Circle: Black Women and Work
Saidiya Hartman
Scenes of Subjection
Geraldine Heng
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
Kelly Lytle Hernández
City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771‒1965
Elizabeth Hinton
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
Arlie Hochschild
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
bell hooks
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski.
“Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography.” Postmedieval 8 (2017):500-531.
Peniel E. Joseph
Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Robin G. Kelley
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Ibram X Kendi
How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Audre Lorde
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Wahneema Lubiano
The House That Race Built
Manning Marable
Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945‒2006
Jonathan M. Metzl
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland
Janet Mock
Redefining Realnewss: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
Suzane Model
West Indian Immigrants: A Black Success Story?
Toni Morrison
The Origin of Others
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches and Meditations
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
Deirdre Cooper Owens
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
Dorothy Roberts
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
Cedric J. Robinson
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.)
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
Sasha Turner
Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica
Harriet A. Washington
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Dangerous Discussions: Voice and Power in My Classroom
Franklin E. Zimring
When Police Kill
Many thanks to the following people for helping to compile this list:
Cara Byrne, Michael Clune, Thom Dawkins, Mary Grimm, John Higgins, William Marling, Marilyn Mobley and Thrity Umrigar