Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing their central role in U.S. history. Also known as African American History Month, the event grew out of “Negro History Week,” the brainchild of noted historian Carter G. Woodson and other prominent African Americans. Find more on the history of Black History Month here.
Here’s a selection of titles about the history of Black America and being African American today.
To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin’s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been.
The companion book to the upcoming PBS series.
From one of our most important voices on the African American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community’s abiding rock and its fortress.
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span.
At the Dark End of the Street describes the decades of degradation black women on the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and clean for their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by 1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, had had enough.
A new historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation, with a foreword by Kevin Young
We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race.
Discover more titles
African American History
African American Studies
African American Fiction
African American Non-Fiction
African American Poetry
#AmplifyBlackStories
Join us as we #AmplifyBlackStories all year long! Celebrate Black authors, leaders, creators, and more who have forged a path for themselves and others. Share the Black stories you love and discover books that can transform your world.
Penguin Random House is excited to partner with We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) as the inaugural sponsor of the Black Creatives Fund, which will focus on amplifying the work of Black creatives who have written books and are seeking publication. We are also partnering with WNDB on our 28th annual Creative Writing Awards to support young writers across the country from underrepresented backgrounds.
