50+ Resources for Black History Month

Black and white image of Angela Davis, who stands on the right hand side in front of a crowd. 

by Abaki Beck

In honor of Black History Month, we've compiled some of our favorite resources below. Find more on our White Supremacy & empire and Racial Communities & Identities pages. Another great resource is the Black History Month Library! Know any other great resources? Let us know at!

History

• Teaching Hard History, Southern Poverty Law Center report on how slavery is taught

• Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

• Lynching in America interactive database

• “Lynch Law in America,” by Ida B. Wells (1900)

• “This Awful Slaughter,”by Ida B. Wells (1909)

• “The Scottsboro Boys” Trials, 1931-1937, website

• “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. April 16, 1963

• Arrest records of Rosa Parks, National Archives

• Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, comic from the 1950s

• Don't blame Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too. by Simone Sebastian

• The Black Radical Tradition, a massive pdf including more than 500 pages of writing by authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frances M. Beal, the Combahee River Collective, I Wor Kuen, and more (table of contents included). Learn more here.

Poetry & Fiction

• Wild Seed by Octavia Butler (full book)

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (full book)

• Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston

• For the Record, a poem by Audre Lorde

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (full novel)

• Plays by August Wilson, such as Gem of the Ocean, Radio Gulf, or Fences

• Let America be American Again by Langston Hughes

• Rosa Parks poem, Atlanta Team of the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival

• Emmet poem, Philadelphia Team, Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival

Black Feminsims

• A Black Feminist Roundtable On bell hooks, Beyonce, and “Moving Beyond Pain” by Lori Adelman

• My Battle Against the Assumed Androgyny of Black Women by Aja Barber

• “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman by Frances Beale.

• Lemonade Syllabus by Candice Benbow, a pdf/book with over 200 art, literature, and historical resources celebrating black womanhood (named for Beyonce's 2016 visual album Lemonade)

• Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins (full book)

• Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination by Patricia Hill Collins

• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

• Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition by bell hooks (from Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, edited by Catherine Ugwu)

• Feminismos negros: Una antolgía edited by Mercedes Jabardo (full book in Spanish)

• An Open Letter to Mary Daly by Audre Lorde

• The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison

• Black Feminism and Intersectionality by Sharon Smith

Contemporary Activism

• #BlackIslamSyllabus by Kayla Renee Wheeler

• Black Lives Matter Syllabus: James Baldwin and Malcom X 

• Black Lives Matter Syllabus: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest

• “Walking While Black” by Garnette Cadogan

• “Black intellectuals, white audiences: Searching for tales of authentic blackness” by Matthew Clair

• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis (full book)

• Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition by Angela Y. Davis

• Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex by Angela Davis

• Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting by Darlene Cunha

White Supremacy 

• The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (preface by Jean-Paul Sartre)
• Black Skins, White Masks by Franz Fanon (full book)
• The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde
• Teaching Resistance: The Racial Politics of Mass Media (from “Killing Rage, Ending Racism”) by bell hooks 
• Defining Racism: Can we talk? by Beverley Daniel Tatum
• Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom by bell hooks (full book)