It’s Black History Month: What are you Reading?

Looking up a Martin Luther King Jr. quote does not fulfill your Black History Month educational requirements. Too many of you misrepresent him or incorrectly apply his words. But that’s ok! It just means you have room for growth – we all do. That’s why this February, you’re going to challenge your perspective. Put in work that Dr. King (and a host of other civil rights leaders) would be proud of. This month, we’re celebrating black authors and their contributions to literature. Below are some of the works by black authors I’ve enjoyed reading that I think you’ll enjoy too.

Explore uncomfortable moments that make some of us address our whiteness and challenge our worldview. Experience profound enlightenment around our definitions of unconditional or platonic love. Discover characters that represent qualities and personalities we find in our loved ones or wish we saw more of in ourselves. February might be the shortest month. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of time to celebrate some amazing – and often underappreciated – black authors.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

GoodReads Rating: 4.17

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

As these characters’ stories overlap, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle to survive. The ruth is revealed about Chicken Hill and the role white establishment played. In the end, McBride shows us that even in dark times, love and community sustain us.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is part of my first book haul of 2024. To see the other books I’m reading, check out my list here: First Book Haul of 2024.

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

GoodReads Rating: 4.15

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. After growing up together and running away at sixteen, it’s not their daily lives that differ, it’s everything. Their families, communities, racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

GoodReads Rating: 3.74

“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.” To his customers and neighbors, Carney is an upstanding furniture salesman, making a decent life for his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child. Her parents don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, but it’s home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.

Behold the Dreamers – Imbolo Mbue

GoodReads Rating: 3.95

Jende, a Cameroonian immigrant, came to New York to provide a better life for his young family. Jende can’t believe his luck when he is hired as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets. Soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades. When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

Sula, by Toni Morrison

GoodReads Rating: 4.02

Sula and Nel are two young black girls: clever and poor. They grow up together sharing their secrets, dreams and happiness. Then Sula breaks free from their small-town community in the uplands of Ohio to roam the cities of America. When she returns ten years later much has changed. Including Nel, who now has a husband and three children. The friendship between the two women becomes strained and the whole town grows wary as Sula continues in her wayward, vagabond and uncompromising ways.

My Monticello – Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

GoodReads Rating: 3.92

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.

United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.

All About Love, by Bell Hooks

GoodReads Rating: 4.07

All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, Hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, Hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Visionary and original, Hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame.

Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates

GoodReads Rating: 4.40

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

To purchase any of the books on this list that celebrate Black History Month, check out my Amazon Storefront: Black History Month Reads.