Black Lives Matter protests are sweeping the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white police officer in Minnesota. The following books provide historical and current context for the ongoing protests. You can find more anti-racist reading recommendations via the Chicago Public Library and children’s book recommendations via educator Brittany Smith’s viral tweet series.
All materials on this list are available to put on reserve through Your Home Public Library.
We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival by Jabari Asim
The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennet
Give Us the Ballot: the Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Tears We Cannot Stop: a Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Separate and Unequal: the Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism by Steven M. Gillon
So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery
A More Beautiful and Terrible History: the Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis