ICYMI: Black History Month 2021

In February, we shared resources and featured Black authors in honor of Black History Month. Below you'll find everything we've shared for you to explore.

Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) was an American poet, social activist, playwright, and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Through his poetry, short stories, essays, plays, children’s books, and novels, he sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives.
Place a request on one of his works:
The collected poems of Langston Hughes
Vintage Hughes
I, too, am America

Amanda Gorman is the author of the poetry collection The Hill We Climb (Viking, September 2021) and The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough (Penmanship Books, 2015). In 2017 Gorman was named the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the founder and executive director of One Pen One Page, an organization providing free creative writing programs for underserved youth. On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman read an original poem for President Biden's Inauguration, making her the youngest poet to have served in this role (poets.org).

Dr. Mae Jemison was the world’s first woman of color in space. After med school, the Peace Corps, and applying to the NASA training program in 1985, Jemison and six other astronauts went to space on September 12, 1992 on the space shuttle Endeavor. Her memoir, Finding Where the Wind Goes: Moments From My Life was recently re-released. Watch Jemison in conversation with PBS Books for their Trailblazing American Women Writers Series as she talks about her memoir and various and diverse experiences.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist and essayist. Baldwin was a prominent voice in the American Civil Rights Movement. His works explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. His unfinished memoir Remember This House, was the basis for the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro. The award-winning 2018 film If Beale Street Could Talk was based on Baldwin's book of the same name.

Request one of his books from our catalog:
Go Tell It On the Mountain
The Fire Next Time
If Beale Street Could Talk

Here's a free digital resource provided by Proquest that focuses on Black Freedom and features primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history. The website contains over 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom including, Slavery & the Abolitionist Movement, the Jim Crow Era, the Civil Rights & Black Power Movements, and more. Access this resource at blackfreedom.proquest.com

Jason Reynolds (b. 1984) is a poet and novelist whose infectious enthusiasm for the written and spoken word has made him an award-winning author and an in-demand speaker. He is the author of All American Boys, the Track series, Long Way Down, and Miles Morales-Spiderman and in 2020 the Library of Congress announced that the author had been chosen as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Request one of his books from our catalog:

Long Way Down : The Graphic Novel

Stamped : Racism, Antiracism, and You
Ghost

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved and was the first (and is still the only) black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In 2012, she was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her other best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and A Mercy.

Place a request on one of her works:

The Source of Self-Regard : Selected essays, speeches, and meditations

Song of Solomon

Beloved

There are so many beautiful, insightful, and powerful books written by Black authors on our shelves that we hope you incorporate into your reading year-round. Check out our fiction and non-fiction book lists and please feel free to ask staff for further recommendations!

Discover a great read: Fiction Book List ~~~~~~~ Non-Fiction Book List

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a world-renowned writer and anthropologist. Her novels, short stories, and plays often depicted African American life in the South. An outstanding folklorist and anthropologist, she recorded cultural history, as illustrated by her Mules and Men. Hurston influenced writers like Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison, and although her work was not widely known during her life, in death she is one of the foremost female writers of the 20th century.

Place a request on one of her works: 

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Nnedi Okorafor (b. 1974) is a Nigerian-American author of African-based science fiction and fantasy. During this TED Talk, Okorafor discusses the inspiration and roots of her work. "My science fiction has different ancestors -- African ones.” The author reads excerpts from her Binti series and her novel Lagoon: Sci-fi stories that imagine a future Africa.

Place a request on one of her books:

Binti

Shuri. 1, The search for Black Panther

Ikenga

Find these great reads on our New Book Shelves! Need more recommendations? Our Reference staff will be happy to suggest more titles for you. Call us at 760-564-4767!

Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975) is a writer, journalist, educator, and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He often explores contemporary race relations, perhaps most notably in his book Between the World and Me (2015), which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. In 2019 Coates released his first novel, The Water Dancer, which earned widespread acclaim. He is also the current author of the Marvel comics The Black Panther and Captain America.

Place a request on his new memoir:

The Beautiful Struggle : A Memoir

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a prominent journalist, activist, and researcher. As a skilled writer, Wells used her skills as a journalist to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South and led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. In 2020, Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the horrific violence against African Americans during the era of lynching. A new biography, Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells, written by Wells’ great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, shines a bright light on this extraordinary woman.

Thanks for following along with us! Happy reading!

Origins of Black History Month

As a Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, believed that truth could not be denied and that reason would prevail over prejudice. His hopes to raise awareness of African American’s contributions to civilization was realized when he and the organization he founded, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), conceived and announced Negro History Week in 1925. The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The response was overwhelming: Black history clubs sprang up; teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils; and progressive whites, not simply white scholars and philanthropists, stepped forward to endorse the effort.

The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation’s bicentennial. President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” That year, fifty years after the first celebration, the association held the first African American History Month. By this time, the entire nation had come to recognize the importance of Black history in the drama of the American story. Since then each American president has issued African American History Month proclamations. And the association—now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)—continues to promote the study of Black history all year (africanamericanhistorymonth.gov/about/).