15 Must-Read Books for Black History Month 2026
This year marks the 100-year anniversary of Carter G. Woodson’s founding of Black History Month. In honor of this year’s theme—A Century of Black History Commemorations—we’ve curated a booklist that celebrates Black voices, recognizes Black contributions to literature and culture, and reflects on ongoing struggles, while acknowledging continued efforts to preserve and share Black history.
I Hear Freedom
The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power
Cisco Bradley. Foreword by Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn
In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz. I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that, although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom. Read this Q&A in which Bradley discusses why the Great Migration and Black freedom movements are essential to understanding the music. (Q&A live February 17, 2026)
Hannibal Lokumbe
Spiritual Soundscapes of Music, Life, and Liberation
Lauren Coyle Rosen and Hannibal Lokumbe
For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, he composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous histories, and humanity. This captivating, vital portrait and spiritual biography of Lokumbe provides a powerful, collaborative account of his remarkable life and work. Read a conversation between Lauren Coyle Rosen and Hannibal Lokumbe in which they discuss music, life, and liberation.
Black Arts, Black Muslims
Islam in the Black Freedom Struggle
Ellen McLarney
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.
The Souths in Her
Black Women Writers and Choreographers and the Poetics of Transmutation
Nicole M. Morris Johnson
Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. In The Souths in Her,Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, it offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.
The Sisterhood
How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
Courtney Thorsson
The Sisterhood tells the story of a remarkable community of Black women who transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which came to include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others—gathered once a month for two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.Highlighting the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, this book demonstrates that the Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration. Learn about some of the lesser-known members of the group.
Her Truth and Service
Lucy Diggs Slowe in Her Own Words
Lucy Diggs Slowe. Edited by Amy Yeboah Quarkume
Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937) is one of the most remarkable and accomplished figures in the history of Black women’s higher education. In 1922, Slowe was appointed the first Dean of Women at Howard University, making her the first Black woman to serve as dean at any American university. Her Truth and Service showcases Slowe’s speeches, articles, and letters, illuminating her multifaceted accomplishments and her unwavering dedication to the quest for equality and justice. It is an inspiring testament to the lifelong struggle for social justice. Read more about Slowe, the role of the university, and democracy.
Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In this book, Shennette Garrett-Scott offers an unparalleled account of how Black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Banking on Freedom reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society. Learn more about five African American women pioneers in U.S. finance and U.S. property restrictions and finance after the Civil War.
Unfree Markets
The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina
Justene Hill Edwards
The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But in spare moments, enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. In Unfree Markets, Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves’ economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in the market. Drawing on wide-ranging archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism, this book shows the limits of the connection between economic activity and freedom. Read about Revolutionary War era America up through Reconstruction in detail and how it connects with the present day in this blog post.
Scattered and Fugitive Things
How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History
Laura E. Helton
During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. The multi-award-winning book Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban North to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow South. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future. Learn more in this Q&A with the author.
Afterlives of the Plantation
Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South
Jarvis C. McInnis
In the award-winning book Afterlives of the Plantation, Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering the Tuskegee Institute’s vision of agrarian worldmaking. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, this book remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Learn more in this blog post about reimagining the plantation toward more liberatory futures.
The Dark Delight of Being Strange
Black Stories of Freedom
James B. Haile III
In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves. Read about the author’s aspirations for this book in this Q&A, A Hypothetic Interview: When the Artist Considers Himself.
Imagining Eden
Black Theology and the Search for Paradise
Jamall A. Calloway
A number of Black writers have drawn inspiration from the biblical tale of the expulsion from paradise. In this deeply interdisciplinary and poetically written book, Jamall A. Calloway explores the presence of Eden and the aftermath of the Fall in works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker. In reflecting on Eden, he contends, these writers rethought what paradise could mean in the face of the catastrophes of the Black experience. Revealing the richness of Black writers’ engagement with theology, Imagining Eden is a profoundly original consideration of literature and liberation, God and humanity. Read more about how Black theological and literary tradition, reimagine the liberatory power of Black art. (Blog post live on February 10, 2026).
Black Visions of the Holy Land
African American Christian Engagement with Israel and Palestine
Roger Baumann
Some Black churches take a deep interest in the global issue of Israel and Palestine. Why would African American Christians get involved—and even take sides—in Palestine and Israel? Black Visions of the Holy Land offers new insights into how Black churches understand their political role and social significance; the ways race, religion, and politics both converge and diverge; and why the meaning of overlapping racial and religious identities shifts when moving from national to global contexts. Learn more in the blog post on Israel, Palestine, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Legacy.
Colored Insane
Slavery, Asylums, and Mental Illness in the Nineteenth Century
Diana Martha Louis
The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. In this book, Diana Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.” She demonstrates how psychiatric discourses made Blacks “mad” both by inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large and by constructing mental disorders according to prevailing notions of race, class, gender, and sanity. Combining literary and historical analysis, Colored Insane is a rich account of nineteenth-century Black Americans’ experiences of mental illness and wellness. Read about Louis’s research revealed about Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century in this Q&A. (Q&A live February 24, 2026)
Why Black People Die Sooner
What Medicine Gets Wrong About Race and How to Fix It
Joseph L. Graves Jr.
There is a persistent gap in life expectancy between Black people and their white counterparts in the United States. It is a direct result of structural racism within American society and has nothing to do with genetic differences. Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. Learn more in this blog post about how Trump’s March 27, 2025 executive order threatens scientific understanding of health inequities.