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  • I love this beautiful book—an imaginative tale about a real bookstore. “In the 1930s, Lewis's dad, Lewis Michaux Sr., had an itch he needed to scratch―a book itch. How to scratch it? He started a bookstore in Harlem and named it the National Memorial African Bookstore. And as far as Lewis Michaux Jr. could tell, his father's bookstore was one of a kind. People from all over came to visit the store, even famous people―Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes, to name a few. In his father's bookstore people bought and read books, and they also learned from each other. People swapped and traded ideas and talked about how things could change.” // The biography of Lewis Michaux at the end of the book lists other notable patrons as well: Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Armstrong, Nikki Giovanni, Claude McKay, Joe Louis, James Baldwin, and Eartha Kitt. Malcolm X often spoke at rallies outside the store (this plays a big part in the book). “Lewis, known for his wit and candor, referred to his store as ‘The House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda.’” I wish it was still around today. I would love to visit it. // Author Vanda Micheaux Nelson is Lewis’s great-niece. She has only one clear memory of visiting the bookstore once as a child and regrets not realizing how significant it was until much later when her great-uncle passed away. // This book is an important piece of Black History. Highly recommend. #BlackHistoryMonth #vaundamicheauxnelson #rgregorychristie
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  • This book was published in 1929 and is one of only two that Nella Larsen wrote. I thought it was really good. // “Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare’s risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare’s interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene’s black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.” (Amazon) // “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. What, for example, one did about background, how one accounted for oneself. And how one felt when one came into contact with other Negroes. But she couldn’t. She was unable to think of a single question that in its context or its phrasing was not too frankly curious, if not actually impertinent.” // Two thoughts: 1.) the ending of this book is OMG. and 2.) I’m definitely going to read her first novel, Quicksand. Have you read either of Nella Larsen’s novels (or any of her short stories)? What did you think? #NellaLarsen #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • Happy Sunday! Today’s #BlackHistoryMonth #SundaySixStack is made up of titles by the one-and-only #JasonReynolds. This man is seriously a genius and his books are sooooo good. From top to bottom: Sunny; As Brave As You; Ghost; For Everyone; Miles Morales; and Patina. Have you read Jason Reynolds? Have a favorite book of his? There are still several I haven’t read, and I’m reeeeally looking forward to Stamped, his remix of @ibramxkendi’s Stamped From the Beginning, out next month! @jasonreynolds83 #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice…” —Negro folk saying // Published in 1929, Wallace Thurman's debut novel “broke new ground as an exploration of issues of colorism, intra-racial prejudice, and internalized racism in African American life. Its protagonist, the young Emma Lou Morgan, is simply ‘too dark’ for a world in which every kind of advancement seems to require a light complexion. Seeking acceptance and opportunity, she moves from Idaho to California to New York. Harlem, the "city of surprises," is in many ways the novel's true subject, its low-down, licentious streets, glittering cabarets, and variegated cast of characters offering a rich backdrop for Emma Lou's ambivalent, picaresque progress.” // The book starts like this: “More acutely than ever before Emma Lou began to feel that her luscious black complexion was somewhat of a liability, and that her marked color variation from the other people in her environment was a decided curse. Not that she minded being black, being a Negro necessitated having a colored skin, but she did mind being too black.” // “She measured everything by her own moods and reactions, translated everything into the language of Emma Lou, and variations bewildered her to the extent that she could not believe in their reality.” // Has anyone else read this book? What did you think? #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • This book was really good. As I get ready to move to South Carolina in a couple months, I was especially interested in Natasha’s stories of growing up in SC. // “I am an expert on being me: a black, Christian woman from the South. So that’s the story I’m telling. This is me using my power and writing my way to freedom. Freedom. That’s what I want for myself and for others now. It will come only when we tell the truth about ourselves, our environment, and the lives that we lead.” (3) // “As a black woman and a competent leader who is somewhat scholarly, somewhat cool, and somewhat loud, I don’t quite fit anywhere within the American evangelical church. I was also raised as an American patriot, attended the Naval Academy, and served as a Marine Corps officer, and as I grow in spiritual maturity that patriotism can easily conflict with my Christian faith, personal ethics, and values.” (38-39) // “We all need to wake up! Knowing our history and facing tragedy make us more conscious people. Becoming conscious and demanding justice must not be the revolutionary acts of a select few in a society. Deep and lasting change will happen when we see the sacrificial and strategic actions of a unified body of justice seekers working together to demand it.” (66) // “To effectively build for the new kingdom, you must also educate yourself. Broaden your scope of reading and listening. If you are part of the majority culture, read books written by people of color and watch documentaries and movies written and produced by people of color. Then share what you have learned. Rally your peers and build a community of kingdom-minded people so that you can all purposefully grow in wisdom, knowledge, love, and service together.” (174) // Lots more quotes in comments/stories. @asistasjourney #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • I’ve been trying to read some books outside of my comfort genres, and a crime novel by “one of America’s most beloved writers,” Walter Mosley, fit the bill. I really enjoyed the book and look forward to reading one of his nonfiction titles next. // “Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators, until… he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island. A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice but to take his own case: figuring out who on the force wanted him disposed of—and why. Running in parallel with King's own quest for justice is the case of a Black radical journalist accused of killing two on-duty police officers who had been abusing their badges to traffic in drugs and women within the city's poorest neighborhoods.” (Amazon) // “You know once the state sentences a man to death you got to have DNA evidence or Jesus himself got to climb up out the ground.” / “DNA won’t help here,” I said. / “And J.C. busy,” Lamont agreed. (165) // “Waiting is the detective’s stock-in-trade. We wait for the right hour, a certain phone call, or something different from what has gone before. It’s not a profession that’s a natural fit for my nature, but the great thing about human beings is that they can and do adapt. The natural boon of spending most of my time quiescent and inactive opened the trapdoor of deep thought. I fell right into it.” (182) // “I liked meeting young black Republicans. It meant that some part of the younger generation was thinking. Who cared if they were wrong?” (207) // Have you read Walter Mosley? Have a favorite novel of his? #WalterMosley #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • I was NOT READY for this book. I mean, the back cover flat-out tells you that “he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of a panic,” but I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a scene in a book before. (This is why I don’t watch horror movies or read thrillers.) I thought I was going to be sick. (Would I have felt the same if she wasn’t a young white woman about my daughter’s age??) I powered through though, because this is an important piece of classic literature, and I wanted to read it. I’m glad I did. It got… um, BETTER. // From the Introduction: “The sound of the alarm, that opens Native Son was Richard Wright’s urgent call in 1940 to America to awaken from its self-induced slumber about the reality of race relations in the nation. As proud, rich, and powerful America was, Wright insisted, the nation was facing a grave danger, one that would ultimately destroy the United States if its dimensions and devious complexity were not recognized. Native Son was intended to be America’s guide in confronting this danger. Wright believed that few Americans, black or white, were prepared to face squarely and honestly the most profound consequences of more than two centuries of the enslavement and segregation of blacks in North America.” (Arnold Rampersad, ix) // “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives they lived with it; even when words did not sound its name, they acknowledged its reality. As long as they lived here in this prescribed corner of the city, they paid mute tribute to it.” (114) // More quotes in the comments. Have you read Native Son? I’m looking forward to reading Black Boy (Richard Wright’s memoir) soon. #richardwright #blackhistorymonth
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  • This book is such an important piece of Black history, friends. // “First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit.” (back cover of the 150th anniversary edition) // “When Our Nig appeared, Wilson became the first African American woman to publish a novel, a story told in the third person using conventional novelistic literary strategies.” // “Recent research has confirmed the autobiographical claims made in Our Nig’s preface and appendices, and has documented much of the story told within its pages. Indeed, the text so closely corresponds to the historical record that Our Nig lays claim to being the only extant narrative written by a black indentured servant in the antebellum North. Besides being one of the rare sketches that tells what it was like to be a poor northern-born freewoman, Our Nig is one of the very few narratives written by a free northern-born black at all.” // “When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. rediscovered and republished Wilson’s work in 1983... it enjoyed a powerful and formative twentieth-century debut.” // From the preface: “I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren universally for patronage, hoping they will not condemn this attempt of their sister to be erudite, but rally around me a faithful band of supporters and defenders.” // Have you read it? #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • This beautiful book broke my heart. That’s just what Mildred D. Taylor does—she writes beautiful books that break your heart. (I bet many of you have read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry—did you know it’s a whole series of books about Logan family?) // “Cassie Logan dreams of college and law school. But no amount of schooling can prepare her for the violent explosion that takes place when her friend Moe lashes out at his white tormentors—an action unheard of in Mississippi as the country prepares for World War II. Moe will be in even greater danger if he stays in town, so it is up to Cassie, her brother, and their friends to accompany Moe on the road to Memphis—and to safety.” (back cover) Yes, it’s just as intense as it sounds. // “It wasn’t that he didn’t like Jeremy; he did. Jeremy always showed him respect. But to Papa’s way of thinking friendships that got too close between black and white could only lead to trouble. Papa always kept his distance with white folks, figuring that was the best way. He didn’t trust getting too close.” (44) // “It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me for colored folks to be going way over to Europe somewhere fighting in somebody’s war and getting killed. Colored folks want to get killed so bad, they can stay right here in Mississippi and do that.” (96) // “They decided what Negroes should be studying, and what they usually decide Negroes should be studying are those fields Negroes can already study here in the state.” (146) // “So what happens if we win? What difference would it make to us? I mean, if we win, are we going to be able to do everything the white folks can do then? We going to be able to use their restrooms in a gas station or eat in their cafes or sleep in their hotels or go to their hospitals? We going to be able to do any of that?” (231) // HIGHLY recommend this whole series. The final book in the saga released in January, and I can’t wait to read it. #MildredDTaylor #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • Happy Sunday! Happy Black History Month! Today’s #SundaySixStack is made up of books about the Civil Rights Movement. From top to bottom: I Am Not Your Negro (#jamesbaldwin); I Have a Dream (#martinlutherkingjr); Walking With the Wind (@repjohnlewis); and the March Trilogy (@repjohnlewis). The Civil Rights Era is one of my favorite periods of history to study. How about you? #CivilRightsMovement #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • Clotel, or The President’s Daughter, was published in 1853 and is considered to be the first novel written by an African-American. Author William Wells Brown escaped slavery in 1834 at age 20 and published the book from safety in London. The main character, Clotel, and her sister are fictional mulatto daughters of Thomas Jefferson’s, based on the well-known reports that Jefferson fathered several children with Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved on his plantation. (As I was reading, I actually had to double-check that it was a novel and not a true story.) // I think this is an important piece of history we should all read—not just because it’s the first novel written by an African-American, but because of its realistic depiction of the antebellum era and its bold and powerful indictment of Christians who claimed the Bible endorsed slavery. Holy crap. // A white preacher to the enslaved people: “You should serve your masters faithfully, because of their goodness to you. See to what trouble they have been on your account. Your fathers were poor ignorant and barbarous creatures in Africa, and the whites fitted out ships at great trouble and expense and brought you from that benighted land to Christian America, where you can sit under your own vine and fig tree and no one molest or make you afraid. Oh, my dear black brothers and sisters, you are indeed a fortunate and a blessed people.” (27) // Georgiana, the lone decent white Christian in the book: “Let us not deceive ourselves into the idea that slavery is right, because it is profitable to us. Slaveholding is the highest possible violation of the eighth commandment. To take from a man his earnings, is theft; but to take the earner is a compound, life-long theft; and we who profess to follow in the footsteps of our Redeemer, should do our utmost to extirpate slavery from the land.” (36) // It’s FREE on Amazon for Kindle. Go get it! #Clotel #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • I’ve been waiting for this book for SO LONG and I finally have it in my hands!! (And soon it will be off to our Bamboo Libraries!) It’s soooo beautiful, just like @vashtiharrison’s others. And I LOVE that she intentionally “chose to tell the stories of exceptional men you don’t see too often in the mainstream.” She wanted to “give space to men like Robert Smalls and John Robinson, leaders and dreamers who don’t have stacks of books written about them.” BUT she “included some big-name figures as well, in case this might be someone’s first introduction to black history. It was a delicate balancing act!” // Some of the exceptional men I learned about for the first time (that I can remember): Bass Reeves, Marshall “Major” Taylor, Aaron Douglas, Eddie Mabo, and Sir David Adjaye. Some of my favorites that I was so happy to see: Arturo Schomburg, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and John Lewis. // These books by Vashti Harrison are a MUST-READ for Black History Month and a MUST-HAVE for any kiddo’s home library. (And the illustrations are my favorite backdrops for book posts. See yesterday’s post.) #vashtiharrison #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • From the preface by Frank Boas: “Ever since the time of Uncle Remus, Negro folklore has exerted a strong attraction upon the imagination of the American public.” / “It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood. Thus she has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life.” // “On December 14, 1927, according to her biographer Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston boarded a midafternoon train at Pennsylvania Station in New York City, bound for Mobile, Alabama. From Mobile she would travel on to Florida and then to Louisiana, in a major effort to gather material on African-American folklore and other folk practices, including voodoo.” (Arnold Rampersad) // “Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest.” (2) // “They all thought I must be a revenue officer or a detective of some kind. They were accustomed to strange women dropping into the quarters, but not in shiny gray Chevrolets.” (60) // “Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion.” (183) // “Belief in magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.” (183) // I’m so thankful Ms. Hurston recorded this history before it was lost. (Background illustration: @vashtiharrison) #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • I wish I could remember where I picked up this vintage (1970) book in 2018 when we were in the States, but all the used bookstore visits have blurred together. It took me awhile to read it, mostly because I expected it to be full of Christianese, and I wasn’t in the mood. Then I read @ibramxk’s How to Be an Antiracist (see yesterday’s post), and his parents were big fans of Tom Skinner, and I decided to go ahead and read it. // There was plenty I disagreed with, and, yes, some of the Christianese was tiresome (the old me would have eaten it up), but there was some good stuff too. // “Words of Revolution was written for an overwhelming number of black people who have given up on Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion,’ passed off on black people to keep them in their place.” (12) // “The other beautiful thing I’ve discovered is that to be a Christian, I don’t have to give up my blackness. I was worried about that.” (36) // “Many of these people… say, ‘Boy, if we could just get people to accept Christ we could save the system. If we could just get people to accept Christ we could put the lid on the riots and trouble. If we could just get people to believe in God we can preserve our great American heritage.’ I’m not so sure Jesus Christ is interested in preserving a corrupt heritage. I’m not so sure Jesus Christ is interested in preserving something that does not offer freedom and justice and liberty to all men everywhere.” (71) // “In reality, just a handful of people in American society control the country’s economic and political wealth and power. In many ways democracy is a myth.” (94) // Would I recommend this book? Not necessarily. But I’m on a mission to learn everything I can about Black history—the Civil Rights movement in particular—and I want to read about it from people who actually lived through it, like Tom Skinner. #IbramXKendi BlackHistoryMonth
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  • Ibram X. Kendi has done it again. His first book, Stamped from the Beginning, is really THE definitive primer on the history of racism. (A young adult remix from @jasonreynolds83 releases in March!!) And, in this book, he shows us that it’s not good enough to be “not-racist;” we’ve got to be “antiracist.” // “We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.” (11) // Read this next part really carefully: “What’s the problem with being ‘not racist’? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’ What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’ The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.” (9) // If you don’t agree, ask yourself why. Because you really don’t believe it? Or because it makes you uncomfortable? // “Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations.” (8) // “Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.” (5) // HIGHLY recommend this important, uncomfortable book. #IbramXKendi #BlackHistoryMonth
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  • 1n 1898, Callie House, a formerly enslaved laundress from Tennessee, “became the leader of a turn-of-the-century poor people’s movement that sought pensions from the federal government as compensation for slavery.” (4) Her organization—The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association—was the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans, and they did not “accept the preachments or adopt the meek attitudes that Booker T. Washington counseled at the time.” (4) // Speaking of Booker T. Washington, he’s one of two Black men I remember learning about in elementary school (the other was George Washington Carver), and the more I read about him from the perspective of other Black people, the more I realize why white people like him so much. (ugh.) // Mrs. House’s organization swelled in popularity—with almost 300,000 members—and the U.S. government freaked. They began “an almost twenty-year campaign to end the pension movement, and it targeted House, a thirty-three-year-old seamstress and laundress with no right to vote but the capacity to become the de facto leader of a movement strong enough to pose a threat to powerful national officials. Despite the government’s threats, she was determined to organize the ex-slaves.” (92) What a BADASS. // “It was a sadly impoverished group that the federal government had declared war on… But the power of the idea of reparations and the growing number of supporters scared government officials, even though they had the groups under surveillance and knew that they were nothing more than ex-slaves and their families meeting to commiserate and work peaceably to achieve economic justice.” (94) // Had you heard of Callie House? I hadn’t. Her story inspires me to 1.) learn even more about our country’s Black heroes—women in particular. And 2.) become part of a movement that works for racial justice and puts fear in the hearts of racist government leaders. #CallieHouse #maryfrancesberry #BlackHistoryMonth
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