American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
By Edmund S. Morgan
A beautifully written study by one of the country’s leading Colonial historians that examines the seeming paradox of the rise of freedom for white colonists and a racially based form of slavery.
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
By Charles M. Payne
A compelling and dramatic narrative and analysis that traces the rise of the 1960s freedom movement in earlier legacies of activism and tells the modern movement’s stories from the perspectives not of national leaders but local participants.
W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line
By Adolph L. Reed Jr.
While the scholarship on the civil rights activist and scholar is vast, Adolph Reed’s study is the keenest and most provocative evaluation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ intellectual contribution to date.
Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle
By Michael Keith Honey
These extensive interviews cast considerable light on hidden or forgotten traditions of black protest from the 1930s to the 1950s, focusing on workplace struggles for civil rights.
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
By Leon F. Litwack
This Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning book poignantly re-creates the world of freed men and women and their struggles to define freedom in the Civil War’s aftermath.
Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia
Edited by Darlene Clark Hine,
Elsa Barkley Brown and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
A comprehensive, highly readable and indispensable reference work providing information on 651 women and 163 organizations and general topics.
Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration
By James R. Grossman
A richly textured and moving account of experiences of Southern black migrants that vividly re-creates racial dynamics in Chicago during and immediately after World War I.
