100 Books Like Before His Time

It’s hard to know quite where to begin with this book–there is so much to love.

This book tells the story of the Great Migration of African American people out of the South across the United States to Chicago, New York, California, and beyond; it transforms and fills in a crucial part of American history that every American should know to understand our present day. But for me, what I love most starts with the way Isabel Wilkerson cares for people’s stories. 

Wilkerson tells this decades-long, sweeping, under-told story through individual stories that are so detailed and compelling, so thoroughly contextualized with historical research, that I was completely enmeshed in these people’s lives, their struggles, their loves, and their feelings. I cared. In the years since I read it, stories from the book often come to my mind, teaching and guiding me like the words of a beloved relative. 

Every Baby Boomer thinks they know everything there is to know about Gov. George Wallace’s efforts to prevent Black enrollment at the University of Alabama.

What I learned from this book though, was that Tuscaloosa was Wallace’s second choice. NASA had recently helped Alabama open a university campus near its Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, and a Black NASA employee, David McGlathery wanted to integrate it. Wallace thought that his best chance to confront Federal power was to publicly stop McGlathery in NASA’s backyard.

McGlathery was still alive when I was writing my book, but despite entreaties from his wife and friends, he refused to talk about this episode. I leaned on this book to fill in the blanks of an unknown chapter in American history. 

Throughout the 1960s, NASA tried in vain to lure Black engineers to its Southern Centers.

The agency had its excuses, but as I began to talk to NASA’s Black pioneers, I began hearing vivid descriptions of the terror that kept their friends from going to work with them at NASA. This thought-provoking examination of one of the darkest chapters in American history helps lay out a source of their reticence.

The book delves deep into the socio-political, racial, and cultural factors that led to the widespread practice of lynching. Brundage skillfully portrays the complex web of prejudice, fear, and power dynamics that fueled this brutal form of violence. Through his detailed analysis, we gain a chilling picture and the backstory of what kept NASA so White.

While researching a documentary, I tripped over an interview with George Reedy, White House press secretary from 1964-65.

Reedy had also worked in Pres. Johnson’s Senate office, and he spoke about how thirteen days after the Sputnik launch, he and an aide to Alabama Senator Lister Hill plotted to use the space program to transform the South. This book fleshes out much of that story. While it primarily delves into the economic development and transformation of the South, it also provides valuable insights into Johnson’s tenure as a senator.

The book highlights how Johnson used his political acumen to advocate for policies that would improve the economic conditions of his region. He understood the importance of federal investment in infrastructure, education, and healthcare to lift the region out of poverty.

The Road to Jonestown is a solid, comprehensive account of the long road that led Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers to take their lives in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, by literally drinking the Kool-Aid.

What Guinn does well is show the early appeal of Jones’s church, its message of inter-racial harmony and social justice which attracted many idealistic young people as well as a substantial number of African-American followers. The book explains Jones’ repeated contacts with Father Divine and his Peace Mission movement.

Jones was a complex mix of charismatic preacher and flim-flam man – both deeply insecure and wildly grandiose with a pronounced tendency toward victimhood and paranoia which became increasingly pronounced as he led his group to its apocalypse. 

I became involved in anti-racist politics as a student. The first campaign I organized was a protest against a lecturer who had written an essay advocating the deportation of everyone in Britain who was not white. The lecturer presented his argument in terms of the need for cultural homogeneity, which meant he did not have to make easily discredited claims of racial superiority. While the racism was obvious to me, I was struck by how many people believed the lecturer’s cultural argument. To respond to it required understanding how racist arguments could change their form, as older racist ideas lost their plausibility. For a while, I struggled to make sense of this. Then I came across Martin Barker’s book and all my confusion was dispelled. Accessible even as it wrestles with complex ideas of culture and biology, The New Racism shows how, from Enoch Powell onwards, conservatism in Britain has… show more.

In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.

Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.

A restaurant where customers walked through a caricatured Black man’s mouth to enter? A fine dining establishment that advertised itself as a Slave Market? An eatery housed in a giant mammy that sells mammy-shaped lamps? This sounds like a racist dystopia, but it’s not–it is the reality documented in Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s book about racist restaurants, past and present. You may feel queasy about going out to eat after ingesting these sordid tales. 

Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen! I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.

“If you can dream it, if you believe it and work hard for it, anything is possible.” This passage is why I absolutely love this book. This is repeated several times throughout this beautiful picture book that is based on the life of astronaut, Dr. Mae Jemison. Mae’s parents were very supportive of her dream of going to space, but Mae’s teacher suggested that perhaps she become a nurse rather than an astronaut. She proved her wrong! Mae also became a doctor, a Peace Corp medical officer, and the first Black female astronaut. Mae is definitely among the stars!