Black History Month: A Sampling of Book Recommendations

In honor of Black History Month, several news sites and organizations have published reading lists featuring books that celebrate Black history. We posted some on Twitter earlier this month, but wanted to highlight a few here, in case you want to expand your personal reading list further:

Newsweek features a list from Booker T. Washington’s great-granddaughter, Professor Sarah O’Neal Rush. It includes Washington’s Up From Slavery and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. Her recommendations for young readers include President of the Whole Fifth Grade by Sherri Winston.

Bustle has a list of modern nonfiction titles, including The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and The Meaning of Michelle, a tribute to former First Lady Michelle Obama, edited by Veronica Chambers. Several writers, including Ava DuVernay and Roxane Gay, contributed essays for the book. (Gay, who’ll be speaking at the Bay Area Book Festival this June, compiled her own list of recommendations a couple years ago for the pop-culture website Refinery 29.)

Finally, Goodreads features a compilation of over 900 titles for Black History Month. The books are rated by the site’s users, with the picture-book biography Martin’s Big Words by Doreen Rappaport and illustrator Brian Collier and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates among the top-rated titles.