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) A Game As Old As Empire - Edited by Steven Hiatt - John Perkins’ controversial exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, became an international word-of-mouth sensation and a long-running New York Times bestseller. However, the revelations that John Perkins presented in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man were, actually, only a glimpse into the world of economic hit men. It turns out this secret world is even bigger, deeper, and more sinister than even Perkins knew. Perkins is now joined by a dozen other economic hit men and investigators, as they go much further in revealing how the EHM game has functioned, and continues to function, in many countries around the world. Through detailed confessions and hard facts and figures, A Game As Old As Empire unearths the truth about what is really going on in the world. Each chapter focuses on a particular case, detailing the methods used to deceive, steal, corrupt, and coerce. After presenting these particular cases, A Game As Old As Empire connects the dots — showing how the various pieces of this system come together to create the world’s first truly global empire. The book then offers a call to action, explaining what ordinary citizens can do to confront and unravel this destructive network of control.

7) Sterling A. Brown's A Negro Looks at the South - Edited by John Edgar Tidwell and Mark A. Sanders - Using oral history and the printed word, Sterling A. Brown set out during the Second World War to capture the response of African Americans, primarily living in the South, to America's involvement in the war and how it affected them. These responses, brought together in extended, non-fiction essays of many different types, illustrate the diversity of opinions in the Black South about the war and the war period in America. For nearly sixty years, the excerpts that were never published languished in Brown's manuscript collection at Howard University. Now, for the first time, all of the completed pieces of unpublished writings are combined with the few published sections into the book that Brown envisioned. The legacy Brown left us is not only a superb portrait of the way in which African Americans of the mid-century talked and lived; he also provided a methodology that oral and written historians will find extremely useful. This is clearly a document from another time, as its now outdated title reminds us, but it reveals a world that still informs our sense of ourselves as a nation. In fact, it is an unforgettable history, which Brown has cast in a bright, elucidating new
light.

 8) When We Were Colored: A Mother's Story - Eva Rutland - Eva Rutland, author of more than 20 novels, presents the timely and relevant story, first published in 1964, of her life in the years before integration, before affirmative action--when segregation was the norm, discrimination was legally tolerated, and blacks were second-class citizens (from the introduction). Her story is poignant at times, uproariously funny at others, and always down-to-earth.