10 Great Books for Juneteenth Reading

To celebrate Juneteenth add these 10 great books by African American and Black authors to your reading list!

Juneteenth is about the end of slavery in the US with a focus on education and achievement, and part of the celebration is honoring great authors. Writing in equal parts horror and hope, the amazing African American and Black authors listed below are agents for much-needed change.

Read about how to understand and talk about racism, freedom and equality today. The stories include first person accounts, interviews, meticulous research, philosophy, historical fiction and speculative fiction.

Why I needed these great books: During my childhood education in the US public school system, history classes did not interest me. Actually, I hated history. I thought of this as a personal defect, not being good at history, but what was taught there all seemed to me to be some kind of fiction. These books are a good antidote, a way to reverse the peculiar poison of biased history.

Who wrote the text I had to read in school, I asked myself? How did they really know what happened? When I tried to compare stories I heard at home and first-person accounts I read in the local library with what was taught as history in school, it did not line up.

Later in life I realized a lot of the history we are taught in school here, and even medical science history taught in college and graduate school here, is kind of fiction – so much is left out, and what is there can be misrepresented. It has a spin shaped by who wrote the text or gave the talk, and has their individual limitations all over it.

“History is the accumulated prejudices, hopes, and superstitions that we carry even if we don’t understand how we acquired them, everything we don’t know that makes us who we are. History is a fabric of memories and fear and forgetting, of longing and nostalgia, of invention and re-creation. History is bunk, and sometimes it’s a good thing it is.”
― Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, in Kintu

Great Books by African American and Black Authors

The books listed below – with the author, year, and a favorite quote – are books I’ve read in the past few years and can recommend enthusiastically. Each tell stories about African American and Black experiences often left out of our history education in the US. In different ways, each of these works also suggest ways to make positive changes in our world today.

I hope you have a chance to read some of these, and please add your book recommendations in the comments section below!

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington, 2007. (nonfiction) “In fact, researchers who exploit African Americans were the norm for much of our nation’s history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research.” ― Harriet A. Washington

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, 2019. (nonfiction) “Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.” ― Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, by Ibram X. Kendi, 2016. (nonfiction) “That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal… no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever.” ― Ibram X. Kendi

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, 2010. (nonfiction) “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.” ― Michelle Alexander

Freedom is a Constant Struggle, by Angela Y. Davis, 2015. (nonfiction) “I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.” ― Angela Y. Davis

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith, 2021. (nonfiction) “What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.” ― Clint Smith

The Trees, by Percival Everett , 2021. (speculative fiction) “Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.” ― Percival Everett

Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2020. (historical fiction) The author was born in Zanzibar 1948 and lives in England, he was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, by Saidya Hartman, 2019. (nonfiction) “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery–skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” ― Saidiya V. Hartman

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, 2014. (historical fiction) “Stories are critical, Kirabo. The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.” ― Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi