I’m looking for your recommendations for books from black voices, books about black history whether it be people or events, or black main characters. Only genres I’m trying to avoid here is super high fantasy and sci fi. Bonus points for lit fic and nonfiction
by AdUpper4038
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Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks is a wonderful historic fiction novel about a young Black American woman in the early 1960s. She moves to a segregated town where everyone is Black. The novel examines the different approaches to equality and justice; being self sufficient and not engaging with the white mainstream society or demanding equitable integration with mainstream white society. It’s also a great story about the FMC and her life/ her family.
Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes is a beautiful moving novel about a Black American family in the 1910s. I believe it was published around 1930 and is semi autobiographical. I loved this one. I immediately looked for more novels by Hughes, but instead I discovered a later memoir called I Wonder as I Wander. I loved this one too. It’s about Hughes’ travels (in 1930s?) as an adult to places like Cuba, Russia, Japan, the US ‘deep south’. The juxtaposition of being a well known, acclaimed, poet and a Black man, and how he is perceived differently in different places was fascinating. Plus it’s just a great story of a curious intelligent writer experiencing the world almost 100yrs ago…
Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, by Heather Andrea Williams. An excellent account of the ways that individuals with power, in the brutal American system of enslavement, intentionally stripped family connections and names from enslaved Black people. And the many ways that the enslaved and newly freed tried to retain and or regain their precious family connections.
The color purple : Written by Alice Walker, it is a feminist, epistolary novel that addresses themes of racism, sexism, and domestic abuse. It features characters like Celie, Nettie, and Shug Avery.
Very heartbreaking kind of novel.
Half of a yellow sun: a book on Nigerian civil war. Focused on classes, persecution of minorities and post colonial world order