University Library News

In 2019, the GSU Library shared an anti-racism reading list compiled by Ibram X. Kendi, professor and Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, DC. This list included links to the library’s holdings of every book on that list. These links are still live and relevant today.

However, we now find ourselves at an unprecedented moment in US history, with antiracist protests sparking across the country… and, due to safety precautions because of the coronavirus, no access to our library’s print collection. Here we are offering another, shorter reading list, also courtesy of Prof. Kendi (though there are many other anti-racism reading lists circulating now), with links to electronically accessible versions of these books where possible.

These books are available as ebooks, either through the GSU Library or through HathiTrust’s Emergency Access Library. The links here will take you to the electronic version, regardless of where the electronic book “lives.”

• Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)

• Alex Zamalin, Antiracism: An Introduction (2019)

• Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018)

• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2011)

• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)

• Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2011)

• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)

• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010)

• Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014)

• Randall Kenan, The Fire This Time (2007)

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; reprints available)

• Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969; reprints available)

• Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011)

• Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984)

• Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

• Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

• Alex Haley, Roots (1977; reprint available)

• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

• Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States (1961)

• Anneliese A. Singh, The Racial Healing Handbook (2019)

• Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018)*

• Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More (2014)

• Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018)

• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)

• Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America (2008)

• Dana Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (2017)

• Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018)

• Elizabeth Kay Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016)

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)

• Rhonda Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice (2019)

• McNair, Tia Brown, Estela Mara Bensimon, and Lindsey E. Malcom-Piqueux. From Equity Talk to Equity Walk : Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education. Newark : John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2020.

The GSU Library does own the books below (marked with asterisks), but currently we only hold them in print form. Consider purchasing these books online.

• James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017)*

• Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (1999)*

• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017)*

• Brittney C. Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018)*

• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)*

• Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (2016)*

• Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015)*

These items, also on Prof. Kendi’s list, are not currently owned by the GSU Library. Consider purchasing them from the links above.

• Susan Cousins, Overcoming Everyday Racism (2019)