#Charlestonsyllabus

Prayer Vigil for the Nine Victims of the Charleston Shooting

Here is a list of readings that educators can use to broach conversations in the classroom about the horrendous events that unfolded in Charleston, South Carolina on the evening of June 17, 2015. These readings provide valuable information about the history of racial violence in this country and contextualize the history of race relations in South Carolina and the United States in general. They also offer insights on race, racial identities, global white supremacy and black resistance. All readings are arranged by date of publication. This list is not meant to be exhaustive–you will find omissions. Please check out the Charleston Syllabus book for additional reading suggestions.

#Charlestonsyllabus was conceived by Chad Williams (@Dr_ChadWilliams), Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. With the help of Kidada Williams (@KidadaEWilliams), the hashtag started trending on Twitter on the evening of June 19, 2015. The following list was compiled and organized by AAIHS blogger Keisha N. Blain (@KeishaBlain) with the assistance of Melissa Morrone (@InfAgit), Ryan P. Randall (@foureyedsoul), and Cecily Walker (@skeskali). Special thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions via Twitter. Please click here to read more about the origin and significance of #Charlestonsyllabus.

#Charlestonsyllabus is more than a list. It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.”– Chad Williams

GENERAL HISTORICAL OVERVIEWS

Vincent Harding, There is a River: the Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981)
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Imagination (2002)
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)
Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (2005)
Tom Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (2010)
Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011)
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, What is African American History? (2015)

OP-EDS AND EDITORIALS

Yoni Applebaum, “Why Is the Flag Still There?,” 21 June 2015, The Atlantic.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Take Down the Confederate Flag–Now,” 18 June 2015, The Atlantic.
Jelani Cobb, “Terrorism in Charleston,” 29 June 2015, The New Yorker.
Heather Cox Richardson, “Reconstructing the American Tradition of Domestic Terrorism,” 18 June 2015, Werehistory.org
Michael Eric Dyson, “Love and Terror in the Black Church,” 20 June 2015, New York Times.
Douglas R. Egerton, “Before Charleston’s Church Shooting, a Long History of Attacks,” 18 June 2015, New York Times.
Benjamin Foldy, “Rhodesian Flag, Confederate Flag: Roof & the Legacies of Racial Hate,” 20 June 2015, Juan Cole at Informed Comment.
Robert Greene II, “Racism Can’t Destroy This Charleston Church,” 19 June 2015, Politico.com.
Libby Nelson, “The Confederate Flag Symbolizes White Supremacy –and it Always Has,” 20 June 2015, Vox.
Nell Irvin Painter, “What is Whiteness?,” 20 June 2015, New York Times.
Charles P. Pierce, “Charleston Shooting: Speaking the Unspeakable, Thinking the Unthinkable,” 18 June 2015, Esquire.
David Remnick, “Charleston and the Age of Obama,” 19 June 2015, New Yorker.
Manisha Sinha, “The Long and Proud History of Charleston’s AME Church,” 19 June 2015, Huffington Post.
Rebecca Traister, “Our Racist History Isn’t Back to Haunt Us. It Never Left Us,” 18 June 2015, The New Republic.
Kidada Williams, “Centuries of Violence,” 19 June 2015, Slate.

READINGS ON SOUTH CAROLINA

William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (1966)
Stephen Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (1970)
Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (1971)
Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974)
Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (1977)
Daniel Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (1981)
Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984)
Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullah (1988)
Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (1994)
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small World: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995)
Richard Zuczek, Reconstruction in South Carolina (1996)
Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight For We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (1997)
Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999)
David M. Robertson, Denmark Vesey, The Buried History of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (1999)
Manisha Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000)
Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001)
Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and his Co-Conspirators,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2001): 915-976.
Charles J. Holden, In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina (2002)
John Hammond Moore, Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in SC, 1880-1920 (2006)
Peter Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (2006)
Andrew Billingsley, Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families (2007)
Orville Vernon Burton and Winifred B. Moore, eds. Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century (2008)
Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2009)
Orville Vernon Burton, Emory Campbell, and Wilbur Cross, Penn Center: A History Preserved (2014)
LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah-Geechee Women (2014)
Charlotte S. Riley, A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina (2016)

*On Charleston, SC

Bernard Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (1999)
David Blight, “The First Decoration Day” (2001)
Harlan Greene, Harry Hutchins, Jr. et. al., Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina: 1783-1865 (2004)
Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (2005)
Edmund Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience (2006)
R. Scott Baker, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1926-1972 (2006)
Amrita Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (2011)
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, “Looking the Thing in the Face: Slavery, Race, and the Commemorative Landscape in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-2010,” Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXVIII, No. 3 (2012): 639-668.
Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “‘Is it Okay to Talk about Slaves?’ Segregating the Past in Historic Charleston,” in Karen L. Cox, ed., Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (2012), 137-159.
Blain Roberts, “Uncovering the Confederacy of the Mind: Or, How I Became a Belle of the Ball in Denmark Vesey’s Church,” Southern Cultures, Volume XIX, No. 3 (2013), 6-25.
Stephanie Yuhl, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History,” Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXIX, No. 3 (2013): 593-624.
Steve Estes, Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement (2015)
Jeff Strickland, Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston (2015)

READINGS ON SLAVERY

*General Overviews

Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961)
Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991)
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: the First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998)
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998)
Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas (2007)
Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014)
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014)
Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014)

*On Slavery in the U.S. South

John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956)
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972)
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: the World the Slaves Made (1974)
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)
William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (1996)
Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (1998)
T.H. Breen, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (1980)
Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1996)
Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998)
Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (1999)
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (2001)
Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002)
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (2002)
Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003)
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004)
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)
Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007)
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2009)
Adam Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015)

*On Slavery in the U.S. North

Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (1942)
Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom the Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (1988)
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (1997)
Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation And “Race” In New England, 1780-1860 (1998)
Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (2003)
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008)

*On Slavery in the Atlantic World

John Thorton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (1998)
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hyrda: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000)
Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World (2000)
Verene Shepherd, Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa, and the African Diaspora (2002)
Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004)
Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005)
Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007)
Edda L. Fields-Black, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008)

*READINGS ON THE CIVIL WAR & RECONSTRUCTION

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935)
Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939)
Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979)
George Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (1984)
Michael P. Johnson and James Roark, Free Family of Color in the Old South (1984)
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)
Ira Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (1992)
Elsa Barkley, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 107-146.
Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1997)
Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South (1997)
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998)
David Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (2001)
Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001)
Alfred Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (2003)
Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name (2008)
Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, & American South after Civil War (2009)
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2010)
Doug Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2013)

*Readings on the Confederate Flag

George Schedler, Racist Symbols and Reparations: Philosophical Reflections on Vestiges of the American Civil War (1998)
Robert Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (2002)
K. Michael Prince, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (2004)
John Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (2005)

READINGS ON POST-RECONSTRUCTION AND JIM CROW

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974)
Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1977)
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (1978)
Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (1978)
Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989)
Robin D. G. Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History (1993): 75-112
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996)
Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998)
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (1998)
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (1999)
Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History across the Color Line (2002)
Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (2002)
Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2004)
James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005)
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005)
James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2005)
Mark Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (2006)
Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (2007)
Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism and Integration, 1896-1935 (2008)
Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African-American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010)
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, (2011)
Andrew W. Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (2012)

*Readings on Racial Violence

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: the Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994)
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997)
David Grimsted, American Mobbing: Toward Civil War (1998)
Sheila Smith McKoy, When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Culture (2001)
Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents (2006)
Rebecca Nell Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-lynching and Labor Defense in US Radical History (2008)
Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (2009)
Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Post-Emancipation South (2009)
Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (2009)
Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance (2010)
Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (2012)
Michael J. Pfeifer, Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (2013)
Brenda E. Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots (2013)

*Readings on White Racial Identity

Ian Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996)
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998)
David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002)
Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (2004)
David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005)
Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006)
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (2010)

*Readings on White Supremacy in the U.S. and Abroad

Note: See the AAIHS’s Bibliography on Black Internationalism and RacismReview’s Bibliography on White Supremacy

Reg Austin, Racism and Apartheid in Southern Africa (1975)
George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study (1981)
John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (1982)
Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: the United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948-1968 (1985)
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (1996)
Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997)
Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (1997)
Stephen David Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000)
Howard Winant, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (2001)
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001)
James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (2002)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (2003)
Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2006)
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008)
Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (2012)

READINGS ON RACE AND RELIGION

Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (1963)
Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1967)
Charles Wesley, Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom (1969)
Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (1973)
William R. Jones, Is God A White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973)
Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978)
Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (1987)
James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Church in the United States and South Africa (1995)
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1996)
Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997)
Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (1997)
Eddie Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (2000)
Albert Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (2001)
Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (2007)
Karla Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002)
Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (2008)
Charles Irons, Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008)
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (2009)
George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (2010)
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010)
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)
Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (2012)
Edward J. Blum, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012)

*Readings on African American Women’s Religious History

Note: See the University of California’s Bibliography on Black Feminism and Womanism

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (1993)
Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993)
Katie G. Cannon, Katie’s Cannon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1995)
Marcia Riggs, Can I Get a Witness?: Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women (1997)
Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (1997)
Cheryl Gilkes, If It Wasn’t for the Women: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (2001)
Jualynne E. Dodson, Engendering Church: Women, Power and the AME Church (2002)
Joycelyn Moody, Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth Century African American Women (2003)
Marla Faye Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (2003)
Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004)
Anthea D. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (2007)
Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs and Justice: African American Women and Religion (2010)

READINGS ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS-BLACK POWER ERA

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (1969)
Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (1977)
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984)
David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986)
David J. Garrow, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Spirit of Leadership,” Journal of American History, Vol. 74 (1987): 438-447.
Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1987)
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson and David J. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It : The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1987)
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988)
Clayborne Carson, The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader (1991)
William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (1992)
David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (1994)
John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994)
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995)
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995)
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (1998)
Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999)
Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) And Black Power Politics (1999)
Jennifer Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party (1999)
Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001)
Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (2001)
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003)
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003)
Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (2004)
Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (2005)
Clive Webb, Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (2005)
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006)
Thomas Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (2007)
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (2008)
Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008)
Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (2009)
Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (2013)
Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013)
Rhonda Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2015)

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Charles W. Chestnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
Nella Larson, Quicksand (1928)
Nella Larson, Passing (1929)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1969)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Ernest J. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love (1972)
Richard Wright, American Hunger (1977)
Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979)
Alice Walker, You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down (1981)
John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (1984)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City (1992)
Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (1993)
Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994)
Tananarive Due, The Between (1996)
Charles W. Chestnut, Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line (2000)
Lalita Tademy, Cane River (2001)
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)
Percival Everett, Damned if I Do: Stories (2004)
Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)
Ntozake Shange, Some Sing, Some Cry (2010)
Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010)
Lorene Cary, If Sons, Then Heirs (2011)
Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir (2013)
Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank: A Novel (2014)
Kekla Magoon, How It Went Down (2014)
Jina Ortiz and Rochelle Spencer, eds., All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (2014)
Alysia Burton Steele, Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom (2015)

*Poetry

SELECTED PRIMARY SOURCES

David Walker, “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” (1829)
Absalom Jones, “A Thanksgiving Sermon” (1808)
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831)
Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (1833)
Charles Ball, A Narrative of the Life of Charles Ball (1837)
Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address To The Slaves Of The United States” (1843)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)
Frederick Douglass, “Slaveholding Religion and the Christianity of Christ” (1845)
Jarena Lee, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1849)
“What to the Slave is the Fourth Of July?” (1852)
Benjamin Morgan Palmer, “Thanksgiving Sermon” (1860)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record: Alleged Causes of Lynching (1895)
Mark Smith, ed. Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt
WPA Slave Narratives (1930s)
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” (1963)
Charles Morgan, “A Time to Speak” (1963)
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998)
David Halberstam, The Children (1998)
Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (2000)
Jane Dailey, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Casebook in History (2009)
James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (2010)

MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES

*Films

Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing (1989)
William Elwood, The Road to Brown (1990)
Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Terrence Francis, Black Sci-Fi (1992)
Haile Gerima, Sankofa (1993)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1999)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005)
Harry Moore, Michael Carter, et. al., Black Wall Street, Tulsa (2007)
Bestor Cram et al., Scarred Justice: the Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (2009)
Göran Hugo Olsson et al., The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011)
Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name (2012)
Kerry Taylor, The Charleston Hospital Workers Movement, 1968–1969 (2013)
Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station (2013)
Dawn Porter, Rick Bowers, et al., Spies of Mississippi (2014)

*Music

“Oh Freedom” (approx. 1865)
Paul Robeson’s Version of “No More Auction Block” (Gustavus D. Pike, 1873)
Bessie Smith, “Preachin’ the Blues” (1927)
Louis Armstrong, “Black and Blue” (1929)
Bessie Smith,”Long Old Road” (1931)
Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” (1939)
Big Maybelle, “Gabbin’ Blues” (1952)
Odetta, “Spiritual Trilogy: Oh, Freedom; Come And Go With Us; I’m On My Way” (1956)
Theolonius Monk, “Blue Monk” (1958)
Nina Simone, “Chilly Winds Don’t Blow” (1959)
We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960)
John Coltrane, “Alabama” (1963)
Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” (1964)
Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn” (1964)
Bob Dylan, “Only a Pawn in their Game” (1964)
The Impressions, “Keep on Pushing” (1964)
Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970)
The Temptations, “Ball of Confusion” (1970)
Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues/Makes Me Wanna Holler” (1971)
Donny Hathaway, “Someday We’ll All Be Free” (1973)
The McIntosh County Shouters, “Wade the Water to My Knees” (1984)
The Specials, “Racist Friend” (1984)
The Freedom Singers, “In the Mississippi River” (1997)
Stephen Said, “The Ballad of Abner Louima” (1997)
Wynton Marsalis, “Blood on the Fields” (1997)
Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Ella’s Song” (1998)
J.B. Lenoir, “Alabama Blues” (2004)
Wynton Marsalis, “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary” (2007)
Mavis Staples, “Down In Mississippi”(2007)
John Legend ft. Common, “Glory” (2015)
Kendrick Lamar, “The Blacker The Berry” (2015) *Explicit content
Vince Staples, “Lift Me Up” (2015) *Explicit content
Kendrick Lamar, “Alright” (2015) *Explicit content

*Websites

*Course Handouts and Other Teaching Sources

FOR YOUNG READERS

Joy Hakim, Reconstruction and Reform (1994)
Zak Mettger, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (1994)
Marybeth Lorbieck, Sister Anne’s Hands (1998)
Karen Katz, The Colors of Us (1999)
Joyce Hansen, Bury Me Not in the Land of Slaves: African-Americans in the Time of Reconstruction (2000)
Deborah Wiles, Freedom Summer (2001)
Patricia McKissack, Goin’ Someplace Special (2001)
Meg Greene, Into the Land of Freedom: African Americans in Reconstruction (2004)
Doreen Rappaport and Shane Evans, Free At Last!: Stories and Songs of Emancipation (2004)
Michael Tyler, The Skin You Live In (2005)
Tonya Bolden, Cause: Reconstruction America, 1863-1877 (2005)
James M. McPherson, Into the West: From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier (2006)
Adriane Ruggiero, Reconstruction (2007)
Linda Barrett Osborne, Traveling the Freedom Road From Slavery & the Civil War through Reconstruction (2009)
Deborah Wiles, Revolution (2014)
Chris Barton and Don Tate, The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (2015)

*This list is currently being maintained by Keisha N. Blain. Please send an email if you find errors; broken links etc. We are no longer accepting new suggestions for this list. However, we’ll include more recommendations in our forthcoming book, Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016).