100 Books Like Black Power in the Suburbs

As a Black woman who grew up in a Black middle-class household, this is the first book that put words to my lived experience.

Black Pickett Fences also led me to earn my PhD in Sociology and to study the Black middle class because this group of Americans uniquely enables social scientists to see how both race and class continue to shape Americans’ life chances, despite the breakthroughs of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.

This book provides a comprehensive explanation of the history of the Black middle class, from the Civil War Reconstruction Period to the present, and an empirical study of the social processes shaping the opportunities and constraints of Black families and neighborhoods. 

Similar to Black Pickett Fences, this was one of the first books I read as I sought to understand the unique position of the Black middle class.

Blue-Chip Black focuses on the social and economic complexity within the Black middle class and highlights how these experiences take shape in suburban neighborhoods. Most research on African Americans focuses on urban experiences.

Lacy shows that it is just as critical to understand distinctions among Black middle-class people as it is to understand differences between the Black middle class and African Americans with lower socio-economic status. Variation within the Black middle class means that we cannot take for granted that the Black middle class has a monolithic set of needs, interests, and priorities.  

This book helped me to understand the cultural complexity of my family—my father is a Jamaican immigrant, and my mother is a native-born African American—and the cultural richness of my neighborhood, Harlem, in New York City.

Like Lacy, Clerge centers her research in suburbia, not in a city. And Clerge explains how cultural distinctions across Caribbean and African American communities offer a rich tapestry of expression, and ways of being and belonging.

She reveals how cultural differentiation shapes and is shaped by class variation and strategies for navigating White domination and anti-Black racism. Clerge also discusses the implications for solidaristic behaviors across people of African descent in the United States. 

This book is written by a political scientist.

It helped me to hold two truths in tension—on the one hand, that there is increasing class and geographic variation among African Americans that leads to multiple, sometimes competing agendas, and on the other hand, Black Americans still express significant political solidarity, irrespective of their other social statuses. Dawson identifies the social conditions leading to shared political goals among African Americans—what he calls “linked fate.”

While his and others’ subsequent research shows that political solidarity among African Americans is waning to some extent, Behind the Mule is still important for understanding why racial status, notwithstanding African Americans’ other statuses, continues to be a core driver of Black Americans’ political behavior. 

A former journalist, Antero Pietila delves into the history of Baltimore’s battles over housing and race since the 1880s. He shows how racism and antisemitism shaped who could live where in Baltimore, eventually consigning working-class Black people to disintegrating neighborhoods in the inner city. Where this book is especially good is on the history of blockbusting in the 1950s and 1960s.

Pietila introduces us to the real estate agents who preyed on Black people desperate to move out of slums and shows us how they panicked white people into selling their houses cheaply to get out before Black people moved in. Pietila draws connections between this history and the more recent example of speculators who lured Baltimore residents into subprime mortgages. Baltimore successfully sued Wells Fargo for discriminatory lending in 2012.

This book reminds us that in addition to shaping our laws, our institutions, and our culture, white supremacy has also shaped our nation’s landscape, from housing discrimination and redlining to blockbusting and urban renewal.

Although Brown focuses on racial segregation and Black neighborhoods in Baltimore, his insights speak to communities of color throughout the United States and how decades of hypersegregation in American cities have adversely impacted health, livelihoods, and lives.

What makes Brown’s analysis of the landscape of urban apartheid so compelling, however, is his recipe for dismantling it and replacing it with a new landscape of racial equity. 

What does it mean to be free—and how can you prove that you are? Millward’s utterly engrossing book demonstrates how significant Black women’s reproductive sexuality was to their pursuit of freedom. Following the formal end of US participation in the international slave trade in 1808, white enslavers placed unprecedented demands on enslaved Black women to bear more children. Because the laws defined the child according to the mother’s free or unfree status, enslaved women literally birthed the property of white enslavers. But what if a currently enslaved person proved that the womb from which they entered the world belonged to a free person? Millward shows how Black women and their descendants paved their own pathways to freedom.

In the space of two years, D. Watkins published two stunning books about Baltimore. The second, The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir, is sharp and smart, but if I had to only choose one, it would be The Beast Side. In this slim volume of essays, Watkins invites us to explore the two worlds he lives within and between. He grew up on the tough east side, known locally as the beast side, and sold drugs, but also went to college and now teaches creative writing.

While there are many books by Black authors that use stories of poverty and despair to titillate or move white audiences to pity, Watkins does none of that. He speaks first to Black audiences, especially those who maybe don’t love to read, because literacy, he says, is a step towards liberation. The Beast Side may be the best way to see… show more.

Goldstein’s and Weiner’s history of Jews of Baltimore is an unconventional account of this border city. Jews in Baltimore were definitely located in the middle between white Christians on the one hand and Blacks on the other. The book does not flinch from uncovering just what this middle ground meant, how the antisemitism that pervaded Baltimore propelled some Jews toward conservatism (including the support of slavery) and others toward progressivism (including abolition). At the same time, the book explores the rich diversity of Jewish religious life in the city that parallels Jewish participation in building important elements of Baltimore’s economy. I loved learning about a city that was new to me.

I re-read this book every couple of years.

I love most of Anne Tyler’s novels, but this is my favourite. It contains my all-time favourite boy-girl friendship in Barnaby and Martine, who work together. I completely recognise and relate to their colleague-type banter, full of inside jokes, winding each other up, and covering up for each other. I love that Martine is a bit moody - recognisably human - and that she has Barnaby’s back when no-one else does.

No matter how many times I’ve read this, when Barnaby finally realises how important Martine is to him, I always get tears in my eyes.