Tears We Cannot Stop - reading list

2018-03-28

Collection of books recommended by Michael Eric Dyson in his book, “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America”. Here’s a New York Times book review.

Next book

• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (1963) - wiki

Slavery

• Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin (1998) - incisive history of slavery before cotton became king
• Closer to Freedom, Stephanie Camp - explores the fate of enslaved women
• Out of the House of Bondage, Thavolia Glymph - probes the relationships between black and white women
• The Known World, Edward P. Jones - about a black family that owned enslaved blacks in the antebellum south
• Middle Passage, Charles Johnson - about a newly freed slave who hops aboard a slave ship
• Beloved, Toni Morrison - probes the aftereffects of enslavement on the minds and souls of black folk
• Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison - slim classic that brilliantly probes the white literary imagination and how it silences and distorts the dark agency from which it derives its meaning

Slavery, politics, & economy

• A Nation Under Our Feet, Steven Hahn
• The Counterrevolution of Slavery, Manisha Sinha
• Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson
• Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert
• The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E. Baptist
• The Reaper’s Garden, Vincent Brown
• This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust

The civil war (and after)

• Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson
• Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois
• Reconstruction, Eric Foner
• The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

Modern civil rights movement

• Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Aldon Morris
• Voices of Freedom, Henry Hampton - based on the monumental documentary television series Eyes on the Prize
• America in the King Years, Taylor Branch - trilogy on MLK
  • Parting the Waters
  • Pillar of Fire
  • At Canaan’s Edge
• Bearing the Cross, David Garrow - exhaustive and illuminating study on MLK Jr.
• Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter - account of the movement’s impact on white families in Birmingham
• Devil in the Grove, Gilbert King - shines light on Jim Crow as he probes the case of four young black men accused on raping a 17-year-old white girl in Florida and the valiant defense they got from future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall
• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, Barbara Ransby - moving portrait of the great organizer and activist
• This Little Light of Mine, Kay Mills - study of freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hammer
• In Struggle, Clayborne Carson - study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black freedom struggle

• Malcom X, Manning Marable
• Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hours, Penial Joseph - invites us to understand the rich sweep of the black power movement
• Stokely, Penial Joseph - penetrating study of the black power movement’s most icon leader, Stokely Carmichael
• Black against Empire, Joshua Bloom & Waldo Martin, Jr. - comprehensive study of the history and politics of the Black Panthers
• Race Rebels, Robin Kelly - the struggle of black working class folk

Intersection of gender, class, sexuality, and feminist politics

• Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
• The Truth That Never Hurts, Barbara Smith
• Ain’t I a Woman?, bell hooks
• Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman, Michele Wallace
• Critical Race Theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Say Her Name, Kimberlé Crenshaw & Andrea Ritchie
• Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker - struggles of black women for room to breathe and love in the south in the 1930s

Essays

• The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois - groundbreaking essays that limn the color line at the turn of the twentieth century
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison - wrestles with the perennial black problem of not being seen by the white world
• LeRoi Jones & Amiri Baraka