Books like The Essential Kerner Commission Report — picked by fans

As I drove through the South researching my guidebook to civil rights sites, my back seat was filled with books. Atop the pile was Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume history – America in the King Years 1954-1968: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.

Though encyclopedic, Branch’s story-telling is riveting—weaving together personalities, legalities, strategies, and geography in a way that made me feel as if I were there witnessing history as it was made. Taylor’s detail, reflecting a journalist’s quest for who, what, where, when, how, and why, showed me that these stories could best be told, understood, and felt where they happened.

Richard Grant a British journalist and adventure writer traveled the world before moving from New York City with his Brookland girlfriend to transform a dilapidated antebellum mansion in Mississippi into a new home and a new life.

In the process he discovers the real Mississippi—good and bad—as “the most American place on earth.” This book makes the reader laugh, cry, but most important think deeply about jazz, sex, politics, food, America’s class system, racism, democracy, and what it means to be American which is in constant change.

Grant’s writing is addictive and an elixir—you can’t put it down. 

Across the South, major statues of Confederate leaders are being removed from prominent pedestals, while schools, military bases, streets, and other memorials named for Confederates are being renamed. No effort is more astonishing than ending the hero worship of Robert E. Lee, the West Point graduate who chose to fight for his home state of Virginia in the Civil War, and led the South to defeat.

In this deeply researched and personal history of Lee and his own reckoning of Lee’s betrayal of the United States, West Point historian and retired Army general Ty Seidule reveals how he, a son of the South, came to revile Lee’s status as a southern God. As a PhD historian, Seidule dismantles many myths about Lee, and proves that Lee was, in fact, fighting to create a new nation based on slavery.

Often forgotten in the study of the U.S. civil rights movement is the even longer, and less successful, effort by Native Americans to regain the sovereignty that they once enjoyed in North America. In 1976 when I was transferred by the Associated Press from Connecticut to South Dakota as a correspondent, I found the state bleeding from its history. The year before, two FBI agents had been murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation, remnant violence of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Drive-by shootings were common, discrimination and poverty were rampant, and I felt as if I had walked into an earlier century.

As I came to learn, from this book and its author, Indian tribes were beginning to challenge America’s betrayal of treaties signed in the 1800s – and winning back rights guaranteed in writing. Wilkinson, a friend, attorney, and emeritus history professor at the University of Colorado, helped… show more.

Weaving in her own ancestral history, Kelley knits an extraordinary journey of the Black working class from slavery to our contemporary world—from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, we engage generations of mostly unheralded workers whose radical genius shaped our labor history and forged nourishing and joyful lives out-of-view of most white accounts of the working class.

Kelley’s prose celebrates and brings to the surface the hidden lives that improved our contemporary world. 

I know Kim Kelly not just as a great labor reporter but also as an activist in my own union.

She brings her deep enthusiasm for radicalism and social justice to her book, which gives readers a ton of background on the ways that the labor movement has fought not just for rights in the workplace but also for the rights of women, disabled workers, sex workers, prisoners, and other groups marginalized by society.

A great book to learn how organized labor is a full part of the struggle for equality.

This is one of my all-time favorite books! It was given to me by my nephew Kareem, in 2018. I have read it cover to cover, twice. My handwritten notes are on over 50% of the pages. 

The research that Baradarian put into this book is unparalleled. The book is chockful of facts and data that I never knew about Black history. For example, her research uncovered the fact that the forty acres of land that were to go to the 4 million formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War was to be sold, not given to Blacks at $1.25 per acre. 

This book is filled with an abundance of typically unknown data, as she admirably tells the history of Blacks in America, through the Black banking industry’s chronicles. 

In the spirit of full transparency, my love for this book preceded the 2019 interview that I did of Baradarian… show more.

This beautifully written and tightly argued book examines mechanisms that sustain inequality among social groups across generations, which Loury traces primarily to discrimination in contact rather than discrimination in contract.

Contractual discrimination can be addressed by law, but discrimination in contact—in such matters as friendship, marriage, adoption, and residential choice—lies largely outside the scope of state action. Through such channels historical inequality between groups can persist indefinitely, even under formal equality of opportunity.

Professor Butler’s classic book is a foundational work in the realm of African American business history.

Combining both sociological and historical analysis, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans includes case studies of notable African American business districts.

For instance, years before recent interest in the horrific destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921, Butler provided an in-depth examination of this phenomenon.

This book is also valuable because it provides an important comparative analysis of historic African American entrepreneurship with that of various nonwhite immigrant groups.  

Black rebellions in the 1960s were a response to the decades of terror by police, the loss of jobs, poor housing, white supremacy, and the evaporation of the social safety net. Rebellions in Watts, New Jersey, and elsewhere happened because these communities were not safe and had been targets of state violence and indifference.

Hinton in America on Fire helps us see how the Black unrest of the 1960s were rebellions against forms of discrimination and injustice, and were led by people failed many times over by our democracy.

Reading this book helps us realize why the George Floyd Protests of 2020 were a nationwide phenomenon—Americans are tired of police violence. This book also helps us understand how current protests against state violence being perpetrated by ICE stand in a long tradition of civil rebellion against anti-democratic forces in America.