LIST: 10 Books by Black Women Everyone Should Read for Black History Month
/By Kimberly Fain
Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler was a Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction writer who is best known for the brilliant book Kindred. In this visionary novel, a contemporary Black woman, Dana, is suddenly transported to a Southern plantation. While there, she experiences the complex relationship between slave owners and enslaved people. Through Dana, the reader explores the intersectional power of sexism and racism from a Black woman’s lens.
Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah is Nigerian writer and MacArthur genius award winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most famous novel. Set in the United Kingdom and the United States, it follows two Nigerians who learn what blackness means in white-dominated countries. As the two lovers grapple with their identity, while living in separate countries, their homeland is changing. Once the two are reunited in Nigeria, they come to appreciate each other and the meaning of home in a new way.
Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (2013) by Emily Raboteau
Searching for Zion is a memoir of a biracial woman examining the meaning of home and belonging. On her quest, Emily Raboteau examines identity and faith as she travels to various locations, including Israel, Jamaica, Africa, and the American South. Due to displacement and dispossession, readers see that the desire to find a promised land is inevitably affected by culture and personal and communal history.
Homegoing (2016) by Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi explores how the trauma of slavery has generational impact in her novel Homegoing. Set in Ghana and the United States, this compelling book shows that colonialism and slavery have a complex, inextricable link. As readers get to know eight generations of one family, Gyasi shows them trauma’s inheritable imprint on space, place, and identity.
An American Marriage (2018) by Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones sets this novel’s newlywed couple in Atlanta, where opportunity for African Americans exists in abundance. Despite the shiny appearance of the New South, Roy is imprisoned, and Celestial seeks solace in her husband’s best man, Andre. When Roy is released years later, he seeks to recover some of what he’s lost by moving toward a new future with his wife.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black “Black Cargo” (2018) by Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah G. Plant, editor
Composed in the vernacular of her interviewee, Zora Neale Hurston wrote this true story of Cudjo Lewis. As the last known survivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade, in 1927, when Hurston spoke to him, he still remembered his childhood in Africa and his capture aboard the slave ship Clotilda. Overcoming the horrors of slavery, after the Civil War, Lewis and other survivors from Clotilda created a thriving Black community outside of Mobile, Alabama.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson
By paralleling and contrasting America’s notions of hierarchy to India and Nazi Germany, Isabel Wilkerson interrogates power in America. Wilkerson explores how Nazi Germany examined the unjust treatment of Blacks in the United States to strategize its own dehumanizing treatment of the Jews. In order to study the violence of structural power, Wilkerson chooses to focus on caste rather than race. The result is an epic book that examines how caste continually reinvents itself to entrench some in power and to oppress others.
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot (2020) by Mikki Kendall
In this trenchant political critique, Mikki Kendall employs a Black feminist perspective to discuss blind spots in the feminist movement. She argues that contemporary feminists should give greater consideration to how class, race, sexuality, and ability converge into intersectional oppression. By using her personal experience to emphasize the need for intersectional inclusion, Kendall creates a sense of authenticity for the reader.
Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) by Martha S. Jones
Historian Martha Jones writes of how Black women — such as Maria Stewart, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Stacey Abrams — are integral to American democracy. Despite the racial exclusion they often experienced in the woman’s movement, Black women have gained agency and political power by fighting for equality for all Americans. Integrating her own ancestral history of organizing and fundraising, Jones makes a compelling case that political activism has lasting effects that transcend a single activist’s lifetime.
Wandering the Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots (2020) by Morgan Jerkins
From 1916 to 1970, millions of African Americans migrated from the South to the North. Along the way, the cultural inheritance of Southern food, language, and family history was lost for many Black families. Morgan Jenkins takes her audience on a journey to reclaim this lost heritage. In doing so, she makes incisive larger points about how cultural history impacts our beliefs and identities.
Kimberly Fain is an attorney, and teaches African American literature at Texas Southern University. She has two published books: Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature and Black Hollywood: From Butlers to Superheroes, the Changing Role of African American Men in the Movies. Follow her on Twitter at @KimberlyFain
