Anti-Racism Resources

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.   Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

In The Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou leaves California with her son, Guy, to move to New York. There she enters the society and world of black artists and writers, reads her work at the Harlem Writers Guild, and begins to take part in the struggle of black Americans for their rightful place in the world. In the meantime, her personal life takes an unexpected turn. She leaves the bail bondsman she was intending to marry after falling in love with a South African freedom fighter, travels with him to London and Cairo, where she discovers new opportunities. The Heart of a Woman is filled with unforgettable vignettes of such renowned people as Billie Holiday and Malcom X, but perhaps most importantly chronicles the joys and the burdens of a black mother in America and how the son she has cherished so intensely and worked for so devotedly finally grows to be a man.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

In 1962 the poet, musician, and performer Maya Angelou claimed another piece of her identity by moving to Ghana, joining a community of "Revolutionist Returnees" inspired by the promise of pan-Africanism. All God's Children Need Walking Shoes is her lyrical and acutely perceptive exploration of what it means to be an African American on the mother continent, where color no longer matters but where American-ness keeps asserting itself in ways both puzzling and heartbreaking. As it builds on the personal narrative of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, this book confirms Maya Angelou's stature as one of the most gifted autobiographers of our time.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A moving memoir about the legendary author's relationship with her own mother. Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick! The story of Maya Angelou's extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence--a presence absent during much of Angelou's early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas.
→→Available in electronic format to patrons of the San Diego Public Library.

In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction. Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

"Basically the finest essay I've ever read. . . . Baldwin refused to hold anyone's hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." --Ta-Nehisi Coates   A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement--and still lights the way to understanding race in America today.     At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

National Bestseller Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin's published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

"The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin's life yet published." --The New York Times Book Review. "The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man." --Boston Globe James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon--Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen--he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.

Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

The classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.   With a preface by Ishmael Reed * "As with Malcolm X, Cleaver's book is a spiritual autobiography. An odyssey of a soul in search of itself, groping toward a personal humanism which will give meaning to life."--The Progressive   By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this significantly prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, we find King's acute analysis of American race relations and the state of the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts. Here he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, powerfully asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

Martin Luther King's classic exploration of the events and forces behind the Civil Rights Movement--including his Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair." In 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States. The campaign launched by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights movement on the segregated streets of Birmingham demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action.
→→ Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.

The story of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of December 1955. Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of desegrated city bus service.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com))

ONE OF TIME'S TEN MOST IMPORTANT NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

"The imperialists know the only way you will voluntarily turn to the fox is to show you a wolf." In eleven speeches and interviews, Malcolm X presents a revolutionary alternative to this reformist trap, taking up political alliances, women's rights, U.S. intervention in the Congo and Vietnam, capitalism and socialism, and more.Introduction by Steve Clark, 8-page photo section, index.
→→Available in print format to patrons of CWSL Library

The autobiography of global human rights icon Nelson Mandela is "riveting . . . both a brilliant description of a diabolical system and a testament to the power of the spirit to transcend it" (Washington Post). Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world.
→→On order at CWSL Library. Available in e-book format to patrons of the San Diego County Library. Available as audio book to patrons of the San Diego Public Library.

Much has been written about Thurgood Marshall, but this is the first book to collect his own words. Here are briefs he filed as a lawyer, oral arguments for the landmark school desegregation cases, investigative reports on race riots and racism in the Army, speeches and articles outlining the history of civil rights and criticizing the actions of more conservative jurists, Supreme Court opinions now widely cited in Constitutional law, a long and complete oral autobiography, and much more. Marshall's impact on American race relations was greater than that of anyone else this century, for it was he who ended legal segregation in the United States.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

Presents a biography of the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court, from his crusade against segregation to his friendships with other famous Black figures. From the bestselling author of Eyes on the Prize, here is the definitive biography of the great lawyer and Supreme Court justice.
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→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

Reviews the career of the first African American Supreme Court justice, who spearheaded great legal victories for desegregation & civil rights. A biography of the first African-American Supreme Court justice describes Marshall's early life in a segregated Baltimore, his work as a civil rights attorney, his record on the bench, and his retirement in 1991.
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Over the course of his forty-year career, Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this galvanizing biography, award-winning author Wil Haygood uses the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, to weave a provocative and moving look at Marshall's life as well as at the politicians, lawyers, activists, and others who shaped--or desperately tried to stop--the civil rights movement.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive

Here is Toni Morrison in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades. These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)," human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

New York Times Bestseller Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive

Reggie Love is a unique witness to history, whose introduction to Washington was working in Junior Senator Barack Obama's mailroom. As "body man" to Obama during his first presidential campaign, Love's job was to stay one step behind the candidate, but think and act three steps ahead during a typical eighteen-hour workday. As President Obama's personal aide during that momentous first term, Love sat yards from the Oval Office and often spent more time with the President than anyone else. While his experiences were unique, the lessons he learned during his tenure with the President are universal. Persistence. Responsibility.
→→Available in print to patrons of CWSL Library
→→Available also in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive.(http://cwsl.overdrive.com)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama "guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race" (The Washington Post Book World).   "Quite extraordinary."--Toni Morrison    In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Barack Obama's lucid vision of America's place in the world and call for a new kind of politics that builds upon our shared understandings as Americans, based on his years in the Senate   "In our lowdown, dispiriting era, Obama's talent for proposing humane, sensible solutions with uplifting, elegant prose does fill one with hope."--Michael Kazin, The Washington Post   In July 2004, four years before his presidency, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States   In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America--the first African American to serve in that role--she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.   This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state.
→→Available in e-book format to patrons at CWSL Library Overdrive