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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI'm ignorant about Black literature
What books by Black authors should I read?
(I'd say what I'd already read but y'all would throw eggs and rotten fruit at me. )
1000words
(7,051 posts)Zora Neale Hurston, as well.
Neoma
(10,039 posts)Oh wait, never mind.
(Joking.)
A-Schwarzenegger
(15,596 posts)rocktivity
(44,573 posts)Toni Morrison
Pauli Marshall
rocktivity
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man"
Richard Wright, "Native Son"
Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
Toni Morrison, "Beloved"
Percival Everett, "Erasure"
ananda
(28,856 posts)I really appreciated Beloved.
tblue
(16,350 posts)to start. Those are classics along with "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and "Roots." So many good ones, but that's where I'd start. "Twelve Years a Slave" is a good quick read and it's in the public domain so you can read it online for free.
"Goin' to meet the man" by Baldwin stands out in my mind like few others. I remember bawling as I read it, and I'd never done that before and haven't since.
Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)so I can't vouch for it's quality but the reviews sound favorable for a large collection of different authors. http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-African-American-Literature/dp/0393977781/ref=pd_ybh_5
Cartoonist
(7,314 posts)He wrote Cotton Comes To Harlem and a whole slew of novels about Coffin Ed & Gravedigger Jones, two black cops in Harlem.
RainDog
(28,784 posts)Walter Mosley does crime and sci-fi genre too. Lots of his work to enjoy.
brush
(53,764 posts)zonkers
(5,865 posts)Only 20 pages in.
QC
(26,371 posts)1000words
(7,051 posts)Obviously, I am biased to the "Niggerati" and the Harlem Renaissance.
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)Black Skin, White Masks
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Beloved
Anything by Angela Davis
etc.
kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)roody
(10,849 posts)by Maya Angelou.
murielm99
(30,730 posts)Octavia E. Butler wrote science fiction. Imagine that! A black, female science fiction writer! She is highly respected, too. Try her book called Kindred.
If you like mysteries, try Walter Mosley.
Everything does not have to be heavy Literature with a capital "L" to be well-written and enjoyable.
RainDog
(28,784 posts)The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer is literary steampunk
some newer lit fiction -
Edwidge Danticat.
Jamaica Kincaid
I love Invisible Man and work by Zora Neale Hurston.
poetry by Audre Lorde, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, of course, and
Kevin Young - also Young's first nonfiction book - The Grey Album.
eta to add poetry by Ross Gay
murielm99
(30,730 posts)murielm99
(30,730 posts)The Women of Brewster Place was wonderful, but my favorite by her is Mama Day. Don't miss that one!
Tanuki
(14,918 posts)Matariki
(18,775 posts)Collected works of James Baldwin. Also Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed.
Mumbo Jumbo is one of my all time favorite books. Very funny.
Older (but great) stuff. I am sadly ignorant of current authors.
Mira
(22,380 posts)"Soul on Ice" Eldridge Cleaver
RainDog
(28,784 posts)and... I can't remember the author or title at the moment...can't google find it... a story about two brothers who move from the south to Chicago during the Great Migration and one gets a job in the meat packing industry...
anyway, The Warmth of Other Suns is a nonfiction book that's a great read anyway... but also in relation to Chicago Renaissance writers.
GreenEyedLefty
(2,073 posts)Things Fall Apart is outstanding.
On American black authors...
Bebe Moore Campbell was a pretty good contemporary author. Also Terry McMillan.
I enjoy the poetry of Ntozake Shange ("For Colored Girls..." and Nikki Giovanni.
Toni Morrison is excellent. It is deep, deep, deep. Her writing will stay with you for a long time after you put down her books.
I read Roots as a teenager. It changed my life.
Langston Hughes has a special place in my heart. I watched a local production of his play "Mule Bone" and enjoyed it immensely.
RainDog
(28,784 posts)Last edited Mon Jan 20, 2014, 12:54 AM - Edit history (1)
sort of a "Romeo and Juliet" story.
Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
The Heart of Redness: A Novel by Zakes Mda
I still have my copy of Nikki Giovanni's My House from when I was young.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)A Little Weird
(1,754 posts)I have read a few of the books people have mentioned but I see many others that I can add to my reading list.
riverwalker
(8,694 posts)Sammy Davis Jr. autobiography.
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)http://www.amazon.com/The-Rage-Privileged-Class-Middle-Class/dp/0060925949
It is not a historical piece ... yet ... but it explains my rage in terms non-Black folks will understand.
(For everyone anecdote Ellis cites, I can provide a supporting story)
tammywammy
(26,582 posts)Here's a great thread from DU2 full of suggestions: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=258&topic_id=10726
mike_c
(36,281 posts)...with some recent threads about Amazon. Thanks so much to all who contributed suggestions!
mzteris
(16,232 posts)Non fiction... bell hooks and (damnit, started typing and forgot his name, I think it's late. Of course as soon as i start to fall asleep, I'll remember!)
Fiction (sf mainly) Samuel R Delaney and Octavia Butler.
fishwax
(29,149 posts)Passing and Quicksand by Nella Larsen
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (non-fiction)
RainDog
(28,784 posts)here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/101669577
I've included a few paragraphs, but the essay ranges across many issues, not just the one I've included here. From The Sun magazine.
http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/451/some_thoughts_on_mercy?page=1
AS ABOLITION became a real possibility in the nineteenth century, a mythology about black-male criminality was crafted by proponents of slavery, and that myth was then amplified after emancipation. Our current prison system, and the drug war that is responsible for that systems status as the largest in the world, actively cultivates the same story of a unique criminal blackness. I put drug war in quotes, because, as Michelle Alexander points out in her brilliant book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, if there were a true War on Drugs, then people of all colors, . . . who use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, would be incarcerated at very nearly the same rate. But thats not the case.
Alexanders book is an incisive analysis of how the drug war has specifically targeted African American men, saddling huge numbers with ex-felon status, which makes employment, voting, housing, education, and more nearly impossible: in other words, effectively reinstating Jim Crow. Among her most striking observations is that in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan declared that he was running up a battle flag in the War on Drugs, fewer than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. That figure jumped to 64 percent in 1989, thanks largely to a sensational (and racist) media campaign. She also points out that the police could make numerous drug arrests by raiding the fraternities and sororities at colleges, but for the most part they dont, because those students are not viewed as criminals: theyre just kids who use drugs.
A few years back I was teaching a summer enrichment class for public-school students in Philadelphia who were almost all black, and I had a discussion about drug use with them. One outspoken child told me, and the class, Mr. Ross, my names not Sally; my names Takeisha. I smoke weed. God bless this child and her weed. But what she didnt know, and wont until she makes some white friends or goes off to college, is that Sally probably smokes just as much weed as she does, or takes OxyContin, or snorts Ritalin, or uses cocaine or Adderall. Takeisha believed that she was different from white people in her habits. She believed she was a criminal, whereas her white counterparts were, well, white. I wish Takeisha and everyone else knew that people of all races use drugs. Its just that if youre black or brown, like the people in Takeishas neighborhood, your drug use is more often policed and punished. But the fantasy of black criminality continues. This, to a large extent, is what the drug war is about: making Takeisha along with her teachers, her local shop owners, her neighbors, her citys police, her prosecutors believe shes a criminal. It is, perhaps, the only war the U.S. has won in the last thirty years.
I shudder at the emotional and psychic burden weve laid on the young black and brown New Yorkers so many of them children being profiled in that citys stop-and-frisk program. One man featured in a New York Times video speaks with courage and dignity about having been stopped as a teenager at least sixty to seventy times. Another, in a video made by The Nation, talks about having been roughed up for looking suspicious and called a mutt. Eighty-seven percent of stop-and-frisk targets are black or Latino, though blacks and Latinos constitute only about half of New York Citys population. How, when their city believes them to be criminal, do these young people escape believing the same of themselves?