Black History Month 2021

By Luis Diaz | February 8 2021 | General

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.

 

I Am Not Your Negro

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his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin’s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been.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 Black Church

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

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

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.

 

Unsung

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

 

Begin Again

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.

 

Learn more about #AmplifyBlackStories here.

A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
9780525434696
Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary
$17.00 US
Feb 07, 2017
Paperback
144 Pages
Vintage

A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
9780593134047
A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 90 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and award-winning historian Keisha N. Blain.
$32.00 US
Feb 02, 2021
Hardcover
528 Pages
One World

Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
9780307389244
Winner of  Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Lillian Smith Award
$18.00 US
Oct 04, 2011
Paperback
416 Pages
Vintage

Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition
9780143136088
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
$22.00 US
Feb 16, 2021
Paperback
656 Pages
Penguin Classics