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Keri Leigh Merritt works as a writer and historian in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the award-winning Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, and is co-editor, with Matthew Hild, of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power. She can be found on Twitter @KeriLeighMerrit
1. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
2. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vols. 1 & 2
3. Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
4. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
5. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
6. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
7. Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
8. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Russert, eds., W.E.B. DuBois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
9. Lerone Bennett, Jr., Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877
10. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
11. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States
12. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
13. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
14. Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men
15. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
16. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
17. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
18. William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century
19. Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
20. Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
21. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class
22. Allison Davis et al., Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class
23. Dána-Ain Davis, Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth
24. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism
25. Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African Americans, Illness, and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction
26. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880
27. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
28. Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
29. Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race
30. Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do
31. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
32. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
33. Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression
34. Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing
35. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
36. James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
37. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans
38. Margaret Rose Gladney and Lisa Hodgens, eds., A Lillian Smith Reader
39. Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
40. Steven Hahn, A Nation under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
41. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
42. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
43. Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America
44. Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship
45. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia
46. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
47. Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
48. Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War
49. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
50. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White
51. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
52. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
53. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market
54. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
55. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
56. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
57. Andrew W. Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South
58. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America
59. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
60. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning
61. Patrice Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist
62. Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait
63. Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir
64. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
65. Alain Locke, The New Negro
66. Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
67. Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You
68. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
69. Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement
70. Terrance MacMullan, Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction
71. Jay R. Mandel, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War
72. Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland
73. Monique W. Morris, Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-first Century
74. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
75. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
76. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
77. Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk about Race
78. Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States
79. Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line
80. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People
81. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
82. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
83. Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
84. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
85. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
86. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, American Lynching
87. Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor
88. Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality
89. Thomas M. Shapiro, Toxic Inequality: How America’s Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future
90. Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times
91. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
92. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race
93. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
94. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry
95. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
96. Jesmyn Ward, ed., The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race
97. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
98. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and William Barber II, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear
99. Tim Wise, Color-blind: The Rise of Post-racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity
100. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States