Charleston Syllabus For Those Who Wanted To Understand Race

GENERAL HISTORICAL OVERVIEWS

• Vincent Harding, There is a River: the Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981)
• Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Imagination (2002)
• Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)
• Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (2005)
• Tom Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (2010)
• Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011)
• Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, What is African American History? (2015)

OP-EDS AND EDITORIALS

• Yoni Applebaum, “Why Is the Flag Still There?,” 21 June 2015, The Atlantic.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Take Down the Confederate Flag–Now,” 18 June 2015, The Atlantic.
• Jelani Cobb, “Terrorism in Charleston,” 29 June 2015, The New Yorker.
• Heather Cox Richardson, “Reconstructing the American Tradition of Domestic Terrorism,” 18 June 2015, Werehistory.com  
• Michael Eric Dyson, “Love and Terror in the Black Church,” 20 June 2015, New York Times.
• Douglas R. Egerton, “Before Charleston’s Church Shooting, a Long History of Attacks,” 18 June 2015, New York Times.
• Benjamin Foldy, “Rhodesian Flag, Confederate Flag: Roof & the Legacies of Racial Hate,” 20 June 2015, Juan Cole at Informed Comment. 
• Robert Greene II, “Racism Can’t Destroy This Charleston Church,” 19 June 2015, Politico.com.
• Libby Nelson, “The Confederate Flag Symbolizes White Supremacy –and it Always Has,” 20 June 2015, Vox.
• Nell Irvin Painter, “What is Whiteness?,” 20 June 2015, New York Times.
• Charles P. Pierce, “Charleston Shooting: Speaking the Unspeakable, Thinking the Unthinkable,” 18 June 2015, Esquire. 
• David Remnick, “Charleston and the Age of Obama,” 19 June 2015, New Yorker. 
• Manisha Sinha, “The Long and Proud History of Charleston’s AME Church,” 19 June 2015, Huffington Post.
• Rebecca Traister, “Our Racist History Isn’t Back to Haunt Us. It Never Left Us,” 18 June 2015, The New Republic.
• Kidada Williams, “Centuries of Violence,” 19 June 2015, Slate.

READINGS ON SOUTH CAROLINA

• William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (1966)
• Stephen Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (1970)
• Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (1971)
• Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974)
• Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (1977)
• Daniel Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (1981)
• Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984)
• Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullah (1988)
• Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (1994)
• Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small World: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995)
• Richard Zuczek, Reconstruction in South Carolina (1996)
• Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight For We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (1997)
• Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999)
• David M. Robertson, Denmark Vesey, The Buried History of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (1999)
• Manisha Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000)
• Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001)
• Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and his Co-Conspirators,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2001): 915-976.
• Charles J. Holden, In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina (2002)
• John Hammond Moore, Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in SC, 1880-1920 (2006)
• Peter Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (2006)
• Andrew Billingsley, Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families (2007)
• Orville Vernon Burton and Winifred B. Moore, eds. Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century (2008)
• Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2009)
• Orville Vernon Burton, Emory Campbell, and Wilbur Cross, Penn Center: A History Preserved (2014)
• Charlotte S. Riley, A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina (2016)

*On Charleston, SC

• Bernard Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (1999)
• David Blight, “The First Decoration Day” (2001)
• Harlan Greene, Harry Hutchins, Jr. et. al., Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina: 1783-1865 (2004)
• Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (2005)
• Edmund Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience (2006)
• R. Scott Baker, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1926-1972 (2006)
• Amrita Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (2011)
• Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, “Looking the Thing in the Face: Slavery, Race, and the Commemorative Landscape in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-2010,” Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXVIII, No. 3 (2012): 639-668.
• Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “‘Is it Okay to Talk about Slaves?’ Segregating the Past in Historic Charleston,” in Karen L. Cox, ed., Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (2012), 137-159.
• Blain Roberts, “Uncovering the Confederacy of the Mind: Or, How I Became a Belle of the Ball in Denmark Vesey’s Church,” Southern Cultures, Volume XIX, No. 3 (2013), 6-25.
• Stephanie Yuhl, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History,” Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXIX, No. 3 (2013): 593-624.
• Steve Estes, Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement (2015)

READINGS ON SLAVERY

*General Overviews

• Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961)
• Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991)
• Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: the First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998)
• Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998)
• Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas (2007)
• Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014)
• Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014)
• Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014)

*On Slavery in the U.S. South

• John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956)
• John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972)
• Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: the World the Slaves Made (1974)
• Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)
• William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (1996)
• Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (1998)
• T.H. Breen, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (1980)
• Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1996)
• Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998)
• Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (1999)
• Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
• Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (2001)
• Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002)
• Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (2002)
• Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003)
• Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004)
• David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)
• Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007)
• Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2009)
• Adam Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015)

*On Slavery in the U.S. North

• Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (1942)
• Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom the Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (1988)
• James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (1997)
• Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation And “Race” In New England, 1780-1860 (1998)
• Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (2003)
• Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008)

*On Slavery in the Atlantic World

• John Thorton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (1998)
• Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hyrda: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000)
• Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World (2000)
• Verene Shepherd, Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa, and the African Diaspora (2002)
• Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004)
• Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005)
• Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007)
• Edda L. Fields-Black, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008)

*READINGS ON THE CIVIL WAR & RECONSTRUCTION

• Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)
• W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935)
• Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939)
• Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979)
• George Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (1984)
• Michael P. Johnson and James Roark, Free Family of Color in the Old South  (1984)
• James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)
• Ira Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (1992)
• Elsa Barkley, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 107-146.
• Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1997)
• Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998)
• David Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (2001)
• Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001)
• Alfred Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (2003)
• Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name (2008)
• Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, & American South after Civil War (2009)
• Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2010)
• Doug Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2013)

*Readings on the Confederate Flag

• George Schedler, Racist Symbols and Reparations: Philosophical Reflections on Vestiges of the American Civil War (1998)
• Robert Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (2002)
• K. Michael Prince, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (2004)
• John Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (2005)

READINGS ON POST-RECONSTRUCTION AND JIM CROW

• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
• C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974)
• Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1977)
• Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (1978)
• Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (1978)
• Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989)
• Robin D. G. Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History (1993): 75-112
• Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996)
• Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998)
• Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (1998)
• Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (1999)
• Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History across the Color Line (2002)
• Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (2002)
• Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2004)
• James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005)
• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005)
• James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2005)
• Mark Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (2006)
• Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (2007)
• Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism and Integration, 1896-1935 (2008)
• Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African-American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010)
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, (2011)
• Andrew W. Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (2012)

*Readings on Racial Violence

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: the Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994)
• Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997)
• David Grimsted, American Mobbing: Toward Civil War (1998)
• Sheila Smith McKoy, When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Culture (2001)
• Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents (2006)
• Rebecca Nell Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-lynching and Labor Defense in US Radical History (2008)
• Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (2009)
• Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Post-Emancipation South (2009)
• Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (2009)
• Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance (2010)
• Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (2012)
• Michael J. Pfeifer, Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (2013)
• Brenda E. Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots (2013)

*Readings on White Racial Identity

• Ian Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996)
• George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998)
• David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002)
• Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (2004)
• David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005)
• Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006)
• Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (2010)

*Readings on White Supremacy in the U.S. and Abroad

Note: See the AAIHS’s Bibliography on Black Internationalism and RacismReview’s Bibliography on White Supremacy

• Reg Austin, Racism and Apartheid in Southern Africa (1975)
• George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study (1981)
• John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (1982)
• Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: the United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948-1968 (1985)
• David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993)
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
• Brenda Gayle Plummer,  (1996)
• Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997)
• Jessie Daniels,  White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (1997)
• Stephen David Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000)
• Howard Winant,  The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (2001)
• Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001)
• James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (2002)
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (2003)
• Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2006)
• Marilyn Lake and HFeagin,enry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008)
• Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (2012)

READINGS ON RACE AND RELIGION

• Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (1963)
• Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1967)
• Charles Wesley, Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom (1969)
• Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (1973)
• William R. Jones, Is God A White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973)
• Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978)
• Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (1987)
• James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Church in the United States and South Africa (1995)
• Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1996)
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997)
• Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (1997)
• Eddie Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (2000)
• Albert Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (2001)
• Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (2007)
• Karla Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002)
• Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (2008)
• Charles Irons, Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008)
• J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
• Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (2009)
• George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (2010)
• Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010)
• James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)
• Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (2012)
• Edward J. Blum, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012)

*Readings on African American Women’s Religious History 

Note: See the University of California’s Bibliography on Black Feminism and Womanism

• Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (1993)
• Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993)
• Katie G. Cannon, Katie’s Cannon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1995)
• Marcia Riggs, Can I Get a Witness?: Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women (1997)
• Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (1997)
• Cheryl Gilkes, If It Wasn’t for the Women: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and  Community (2001)
• Jualynne E. Dodson, Engendering Church: Women, Power and the AME Church (2002)
• Joycelyn Moody, Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth Century African American Women (2003)
• Marla Faye Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (2003)
• Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004)
• Anthea D. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (2007)
• Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs and Justice: African American Women and Religion (2010)

READINGS ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS-BLACK POWER ERA

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
• James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
• Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (1977)
• Clayborne Carson, In Struggle:  SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
• Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984)
• David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986)
• David J. Garrow, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Spirit of Leadership,” Journal of American History, Vol. 74 (1987): 438-447.
• Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr.  (1987)
• Jo Ann Gibson Robinson and David J. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It : The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1987)
• Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988)
• Clayborne Carson, The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader (1991)
• William Van Deburg,  New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (1992)
• David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (1994)
• John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994)
• Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995)
• Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995)
• Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (1998)
• Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999)
• Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) And Black Power Politics (1999)
• Jennifer Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party (1999)
• Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001)
• Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (2001)
• Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003)
• Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003)
• Lance Hill,  The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (2004)
• Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (2005)
• Clive Webb, Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (2005)
• Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006)
• Thomas Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (2007)
• Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (2008)
• Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008)
• Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (2009)
• Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (2013)
• Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013)
• Rhonda Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2015)

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

• Charles W. Chestnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
• James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
• Nella Larson, Quicksand (1928)
• Nella Larson, Passing (1929)
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
• James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
• Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1969)
• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
• Ernest J. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
• Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love (1972)
• Richard Wright, American Hunger (1977)
• Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979)
• Alice Walker, You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down (1981)
• John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (1984)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
• Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
• Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
• Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City (1992)
• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (1993)
• Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994)
• Tananarive Due, The Between (1996)
• Charles W. Chestnut, Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line (2000)
• Lalita Tademy, Cane River (2001)
• Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)
• Percival Everett, Damned if I Do: Stories (2004)
• Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)
• Ntozake Shange, Some Sing, Some Cry (2010)
• Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010)
• Lorene Cary, If Sons, Then Heirs (2011)
• Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir (2013)
• Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank: A Novel (2014)
• Kekla Magoon, How It Went Down (2014)
• Jina Ortiz and Rochelle Spencer, eds., All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (2014)
• Alysia Burton Steele, Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom (2015)

*Poetry

• Poetry by Lucille Clifton
• Poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Poetry by Rita Dove
• Poetry by Nikki Finney
• Poetry by Vievee Francis
• Poetry by Nikki Giovanni
• Poetry of Robert Hayden
• Poetry by Langston Hughes
• Poetry by James Weldon Johnson
• Poetry by Claude McKay
• Poetry by Claudia Rankine
• Poetry by Natasha Tretheway
• Poetry by Kevin Young

SELECTED PRIMARY SOURCES

• David Walker, “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” (1829)
• Absalom Jones, “A Thanksgiving Sermon” (1808)
• Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831)
• Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (1833)
• Charles Ball, A Narrative of the Life of Charles Ball (1837)
• Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address To The Slaves Of The United States” (1843)
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)
• Frederick Douglass, “Slaveholding Religion and the Christianity of Christ” (1845)
• Jarena Lee, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1849)
• “What to the Slave is the Fourth Of July?” (1852)
• Benjamin Morgan Palmer, “Thanksgiving Sermon” (1860)
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record: Alleged Causes of Lynching (1895)
• Mark Smith, ed. Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt
• WPA Slave Narratives (1930s)
• Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” (1963)
• Charles Morgan, “A Time to Speak” (1963)
• Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)
• Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
• John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998)
• David Halberstam, The Children (1998)
• Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (2000)
• Jane Dailey, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Casebook in History (2009)
• James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (2010)

MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES

*Films

• Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing (1989)
• William Elwood, The Road to Brown (1990)
• Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
• Terrence Francis, Black Sci-Fi (1992)
• Haile Gerima, Sankofa (1993)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1999)
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005)
• Harry Moore, Michael Carter, et. al., Black Wall Street, Tulsa (2007)
• Bestor Cram et al., Scarred Justice: the Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (2009)
• Göran Hugo Olsson et al., The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011)
• Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name (2012)
• Kerry Taylor, The Charleston Hospital Workers Movement, 1968–1969 (2013)
• Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station (2013)
• Dawn Porter, Rick Bowers, et al., Spies of Mississippi (2014)

*Websites

• After Slavery: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas
• Charleston Hospital Workers Movement, 1968-1969
• The Color Line–on the History of Racism in the U.S.
• Facing History and Ourselves’ List of Resources on Teaching Reconstruction
• Hudson River Valley Heritage Digital Collection of Primary Sources
• RACE: A Public Education Project through the American Anthropological Association
• Voices from the Days of Slavery (Library of Congress)
• Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
• Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America
• Zinn Education Project–Teaching a People’s History

*Course Handouts and Other Teaching Sources

• Caleb McDaniel’s “The American Civil War Era” Rice University course handouts
• Selected Historical Newspapers (courtesy of the Library of Congress)
• Quotes, Videos and Various Sources on AntiBlackness
• Black History Resources for Children
• State Sanctioned: Sample Curricula and Lesson Plans on Racial Violence
• William Buckley debates James Baldwin at Cambridge

FOR YOUNG READERS

• Joy Hakim, Reconstruction and Reform (1994)
• Zak Mettger, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (1994)
• Marybeth Lorbieck, Sister Anne’s Hands (1998)
• Karen Katz, The Colors of Us (1999)
• Joyce Hansen, Bury Me Not in the Land of Slaves: African-Americans in the Time of Reconstruction (2000)
• Deborah Wiles, Freedom Summer (2001)
• Patricia McKissack, Goin’ Someplace Special (2001)
• Meg Greene, Into the Land of Freedom: African Americans in Reconstruction (2004)
• Doreen Rappaport and Shane Evans, Free At Last!: Stories and Songs of Emancipation (2004)
• Michael Tyler, The Skin You Live In (2005)
• Tonya Bolden, Cause: Reconstruction America, 1863-1877 (2005)
• James M. McPherson,  Into the West: From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier (2006)
• Adriane Ruggiero, Reconstruction (2007)
• Linda Barrett Osborne, Traveling the Freedom Road From Slavery & the Civil War through Reconstruction (2009)
• Deborah Wiles, Revolution (2014)
• Chris Barton and Don Tate, The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (2015)