The annual book selection and potluck meeting of the Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group is this week — our most fun meeting of the year! I usually call this group the Diversity Book Club on my blog since that’s more descriptive.
If you live in the St. Louis area, we love new members — send me an email and I’ll get you the details. I’m on yahoo.com and use joyweesemoll as my username.
Our group has been meeting since the summer of 2008. That’s long enough that we’ve started to forget what books we already read. So, my annual tradition is to list all of them, so we don’t accidentally choose one we’ve already read — we’re up to 64 books! I’ve reviewed some of the later ones, so I’ll link to those. This list will be a good resource for anyone who wants to understand why #WeNeedDiverseBooks or how we got to the point that #BlackLivesMatter was a needed hash tag.
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black by Gregory Williams
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son By Tim Wise
Dreams of my Father by Barack Obama
Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit and Herbert Kohl
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Black Wealth, White Wealth by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro
When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories by Bernestine Singley
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy DeGruy Leary
Race Matters by Cornel West
The Color of Water by James McBride
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception by Martha Sandweiss
Modello: A Story of Hope for the Inner City and Beyond by Jack Pransky
Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad by Betty DeRamus
The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed
Best African-American Fiction 2009, ed. E. Lynn Harris and Gerald Early
140 Years of Soul: A History of African-Americans in Manhattan Kansas, 1865-2005by Geraldine Baker Walton
The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges–And Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by Daniel Golden
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir by Jennifer Lynn Baszile
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris
Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam by Sonsyrea Tate
Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Harper Barnes
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Muta Maathai
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire
Color Me English: Thoughts about Migrations and Belonging Before and After 9/11 by Caryl Phillips
Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride
Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America by Rich Benjamin
killing rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks
How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick
Wake of the Wind by J. California Cooper
No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities by Will Allen
Telling Memories Among Southern Women by Susan Tucker
Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America by Lerone Bennett, Jr
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
Malindy’s Freedom: the Story of a Slave Family by Mildred Johnson and Theresa Delsoin
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
TransAtlantic: A Novel by Colum McCann
Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire by Andrea Stuart
Substitute Me: A Novel by Lori L Tharps
Some of My Best Friends are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America by Tanner Colby
Ain’t But a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings about St. Louis edited by Gerald Early
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Autobiography of a People by Herb Boyd
Sundown Towns by James Loewen
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King
South of Haunted Dreams by Eddie Harris
Fragmented by Design by E. Terrence Jones
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Do you have an suggestions for our next year of reading?
