History is a living, breathing thing. It’s something that, for better or for worse, is never stagnant but is constantly shifting and being renegotiated. In America, Black History Month in particular has the ability to illuminate the most turbulent and horrific periods of this country’s past and present, but it also paves the way forward into a glorious future.

There is no list that could fully cover the Black literary canon, but for this February, Shondaland picked some essential reading that helps to paint a more complete picture of where we’ve been and where we’re going — which is always toward freedom.

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

BUY NOW

If you want to begin to understand Malcolm X, a leader in the Nation of Islam and an international civil rights figure before his assassination in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley is critical reading. And with The Dead Are Arising, Les and Tamara Payne expand the canon on this Black civil rights luminary with astounding richness.

Les Payne, a renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, spent nearly 30 years interviewing a wide range of people who knew Malcolm X — his living siblings, classmates and cellmates, National of Islam figures, friends, FBI moles and cops, and global political leaders. And after Les Payne’s death in 2018, his daughter Tamara helped finish her father’s work. In this oral biography, hundreds of hours of interviews are woven together to create a never-before-seen portrait of Malcolm X.

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

The Mothers

The Mothers

The Mothers

Brit Bennett writes Black women characters with a tenderness, care, and skill that make her work exemplary. She’s best known for her novel The Vanishing Half, but The Mothers is an excellent work that deserves to be revisited throughout the year. It’s a gorgeous novel about love, and how it haunts and shapes us. Set in a Black community in Southern California and punctuated by a chorus of prose from a nameless group of church mothers, The Mothers tells the story of Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey — and the tangle of secrets and what-ifs that brings these three together and tears them apart over the years.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing

Homegoing

Homegoing

The sweeping family epic takes on a singular mission in Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, where she traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade through the branches of one family torn apart.

In 18th-century Ghana, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages. When slavers come to their respective homes, Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in the lush rooms of Cape Coast Castle, while her sister Esi, who has been captured without Effia’s knowledge, lives in the dungeons below with thousands of other enslaved people who will soon be shipped to America.

As Homegoing continues, readers see Effia’s descendants survive warfare in Ghana and British colonization, and they see Esi’s descendants in America surviving slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. The novel continues in stretches to the present day, when past and present meet poetically. Understanding history through this family will leave you shaken, but you will also understand the soul of the African diaspora in a deeper way.

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

William Morrow & Company All About Love: New Visions

All About Love: New Visions

William Morrow & Company All About Love: New Visions

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved,” the late bell hooks writes in one of her most widely recognized works.

Love is a revolutionary act, and this can be felt no clearer than in hooks’ All About Love. Throughout several essays, she explores the meaning of love — what it is, what it is not, and the power it has to change the world. It’s impossible not to read this book and find yourself altered by the experience, all your thoughts about love shifting for the better.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing


Sing, Unburied, Sing is a masterful road-trip novel by Jesmyn Ward, set in the writer’s home of Mississippi. The story follows a boy named Jojo and his baby sister Kayla, who are raised by their grandparents as their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, and their white, incarcerated father come in and out of their lives. Jojo and Kayla’s family have more than their share of troubles and complications — Leonie sees visions of her dead brother when she’s high, and their grandmother is dying of cancer.

When the father is released from prison, Leonie packs up her children and travels to Parchman Farm, aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a trip that will change this family forever.

We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to,” abolitionist thinker and organizer Mariame Kaba writes in We Do This ’Til We Free Us, a necessary text on dismantling the carceral system.

With so many Black people living under the oppressive prison-industrial system — which has strong roots in chattel slavery — it’s crucial that we continue to engage in imaginative solutions for how to transform our society into one focused on radical justice not punishment. In this collection of essays and interviews, Kaba shares her reflections with readers on how we can not only change the world but build a new one.

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

In the history of the civil rights movement, women rarely get the recognition they are owed and are often overshadowed and relegated to auxiliary figures. But in this fascinating work, The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs explores the lives of the mothers of the most influential men of the civil rights movement — Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little. In this work, Tubbs illustrates these women’s lives and how they contributed to the most groundbreaking gains in history, changing America and the world forever.

The Amen Corner by James Baldwin

The Amen Corner

The Amen Corner

The Amen Corner

Credit: Vintage

In all its forms, faith and religion is integral to the Black experience in America. A tool of oppression and a tool of revolution, a comfort and a burden, spirituality has been at the core of Black history. In The Amen Corner by James Baldwin — his first attempt at theater after his successful novel Go Tell It on the Mountain — religion and poverty are explored through the experience of one Black family in Harlem. The play centers around Margaret Alexander, a church pastor in Harlem whose dying husband returns after a long absence. Margaret’s son David grew up his entire life believing that his father had abandoned him, but as his father’s return soon shows to everyone, including the congregation, it was actually Margaret who left her husband in search of a religious life. This play is masterful in its centering of the Black church while also exploring the ways that we allow religion to be a shield against the potential hurt that life and love can pose.


Nylah Burton is a Chicago-based writer. Follow her on Twitter @yumcoconutmilk.

Get Shondaland directly in your inbox: SUBSCRIBE TODAY