1) Mis-Education of The Negro - Carter G. Woodson - This should be required reading for every person of color. Woodson's work helps us understand that African peoples are truly mis-educated. We largely receive an Eurocentric or White middle class, elitist education that fails to serve the needs of our community. This mis-education creates a serious identity crisis on the part of African American youth and causes many African American "educated" people to spend more time trying to reach the consumer American Dream rather than working toward a real self-determination agenda of African peoples.

2) The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois - With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neo-slavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, mis-education, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is DuBois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

3) Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington - Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans' success.

4) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas - Frederick Douglas - In 1845, just seven years after his escape from slavery, the young Frederick Douglass published this powerful account of his life in bondage and his triumph over oppression. The book, which marked the beginning of Douglass's career as an impassioned writer, journalist, and orator for the abolitionist cause, reveals the terrors he faced as a slave, the brutalities of his owners and overseers, and his narrowing escape to the North. It has become a classic of American autobiography.

5) The Black Jacobins - C. L. R. James- In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the most profitable real estate in the world. These profits came at a price: while its sugar plantations supplied two-thirds of France's overseas trade, they also stimulated the greatest individual market for the slave trade. The slaves were brutally treated and died in great numbers, prompting a never-ending influx of new slaves.  The French Revolution sent waves all the way across the Atlantic, dividing the colony's white population in 1791. The elites remained royalist, while the bourgeoisie embraced the revolutionary ideals. The slaves seized the moment and in the confusion rebelled en masse against their owners. The Haitian Slave Revolt had begun. When it ended in 1803, Saint Domingue had become Haiti, the first independent nation in the Caribbean. C.L.R. James tells the story of the revolt and the events leading up to it in his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. James's personal beliefs infuse his narrative: in his preface to a 1962 edition of the book, he asserts that , when written in 1938, it was "intended to stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa." James writes passionately about the horrific lives of the slaves and of the man who rose up and led them--a semiliterate slave named François-Dominique Toussaint
L'Ouverture. As James notes, however, "Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint."

Recommended Reading - Current

6) Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it.  Alexander shows that, by targeting black me through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control.

7) Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn't just some relic from the bad old days. It's alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you.

"At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq'' civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened." Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes "produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today." Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld.

8) Camilo Casey -  In Manzili's 7 Journeys, the ancient peoples of Africa and the Americas are brought together in a tale that imagines a transoceanic encounter between the two cultures many centuries ago.  The events in the story invoke two life-guiding principles of African origin and inspiration woven together with fantasy and historical fact: Ma'at and Kwanzaa.

9) Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon - African Americans and the Haitian Revolution examines the importance of the Haitian Revolution as a defining event for African Americans.  In particular, the Haitian Revolution has been for African Americans of different eras a vehicle through which collective memory and identity are created and transformed-an event that has inspired and influenced black nationalism, abolitionism, black socialist and revolutionary thought, and Pan Africanism.

10) Williard Jenkins with Randy Weston - African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston.  The pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston is one of the world's most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller whose career has spanned five continents and more than six decades.  Packed with fascinating anecdotes, African Rhythms is Weston's life story.

11) Dr. Clarence Lusane - The Black History of the White House. In this unprecedented work, Clarence Lusane presents a comprehensive history of the White House from an African American perspective, illuminating the central role it has played in advancing, thwarting or simply ignoring efforts to achieve equal rights for all. Here are the stories of those who were forced to work on the construction of the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the determined leaders who pressured U.S. presidents to outlaw slavery, White House slaves and servants who went on to write books, Secret Service agents harassed by racist peers, Washington insiders who rose to the highest levels of power, the black artists and intellectuals invited to the White House, community leaders who waged presidential campaigns, and many others.