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NOTE: In keeping with our policy at Historianspeaks.org, we seek to provide sources about the Black past and present to educate and inform our readers, This reading list provides a list of foundational and contemporary readings on Black Anti-Violence. This list is intended to accompany Mari Carabtree's Enduring Histories of Black Anti-Violence, which appeared on the blog today.
Mari N. Crabtree is an associate professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston who specializes in African American history and culture since 1865. Her book, My Soul is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, 1940-1970, is forthcoming from the New Directions in Narrative History Series at Yale University Press, and she has an essay on subterfuge in the African American cultural tradition published in Raritan as well as an essay on reimagining the temporal and geographic boundaries of lynching that will appear in an edited volume, Reconstruction at 150. Her next book project expands upon the subject of her Raritan essay and is titled Shuffling Like Uncle Tom, Thinking Like Nat Turner: Humor, Deception, and Irony in the African American Cultural Tradition.
WHITE SUPREMACY
George M. Frederickson. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Charles Mills. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
THE BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE
Angela Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.
Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005.
Vincent Harding. There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. San Diego: Harvest Book, 1981.
Robin D.G. Kelley. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
ENSLAVEMENT AND VIOLENCE
Daina Ramey Berry. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.
Daina Ramey Berry, and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Stephanie Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Peter Wood. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Random House, 1974.
JIM CROW VIOLENCE
Mari N. Crabtree. My Soul is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, 1940–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming.
Crystal N. Feimster. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Sarah Haley. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Leon F. Litwack.. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Ashraf H.A Rushdy. The End of American Lynching. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Isabel Wilkerson. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Kidada E. Williams. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War 1. New York: NYU Press, 2011
CIVIL RIGHTS and BLACK POWER ERA VIOLENCE
Seth Cagin, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Macmillan, 1988.
Jeffrey Haas. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.
Spike Lee, dir. 4 Little Girls. 1997; Brooklyn: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2004. DVD.
Danielle N. McGuire. The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Mamie Mobley-Till, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: One World, 2003.
POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA VIOLENCE
Dwayne Betts. A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison. New York: Avery, 2010.
Herb Frazier, Bernard Edward Powers, Jr., Marjory Wentworth. We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2016.
Charles J. Ogletree., and Austin Sarat, eds. From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Chad Williams, Kidada Williams and Keisha Blain, eds. Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence. Athens: Unive