Top 20 Books for Black History Month

As part of San Diego State University's commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in community engagement, the University Library last year unveiled its Africana Studies Collection (ASC) space. In addition to an inviting and inspiring new space, hundreds of new books were purchased and added to SDSU’s existing and extensive collection of works by, for, and about the Black experience in the U.S. 

The ASC book checked out most frequently over the past year is the 30th anniversary edition of Patricia Hill Collins’s “Black Feminist Thought” (2022), a book described in an early review as “one of the first and fullest articulations of what a feminist sociology of knowledge would look like.” 

Here are the 20 most popular books in the ASC space. Additional books may be found by browsing the ASC shelves on the third floor of Love Library, along with  artifacts and photos of Black leaders from SDSU’s history. 

Readers can also browse this collection by entering “Africana Studies Collection” into the One Search box found on the homepage of the library website. To learn more on these topics, use the library catalog, the Africana Studies research guide, or book a consultation with Outreach and Diversity Initiatives Librarian Gloria Rhodes to identify other library materials, both print and digital. 

Come visit and explore.

Book summaries provided by the publisher

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, And The Politics Of Empowerment

by Patricia Hill Collins

In the first major update to this classic book in many years, Collins traces the history and contours of Black women's ideas and actions to argue that Black feminist thought is the discourse that fosters Black women's survival, persistence, and success against the odds.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

by Maya Angelou

An African American woman recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums in the 1930's and 1940's.

Twice As Hard: The Stories Of Black Women Who Fought To Become Physicians, From The Civil War To The 21st Century

by Jasmine Brown

In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a champions a new history, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school. 

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race

by Beverly Daniel Tatum

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides.

Black And Queer On Campus

by Michael P. Jeffries

Black and Queer on Campus is a ground-breaking account of queer Black experiences on college campuses, based on 65 interviews with Black LGBTQ students.

Black Health Matters: The Vital Facts You Must Know To Protect Your Health And Those Of Your Loved Ones

by Richard W. Walker, Jr.

In Black Health Matters, Dr. Richard W. Walker examples the most common problems facing African Americans today--including diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, kidney failure, and more--explains the causes, and offers solutions in the form of healthy diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, and other lifestyle changes. The issue of racism in health is also addressed.

Black Is A Church: Christianity And The Contours Of African American Life

by Josef Sorett

Black is a Church accounts for the entangled logics of Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism that coalesced within the modern category of religion and which facilitated the emergence of black subjectivity and social life in North America.

Closed For Democracy: How Mass School Closure Undermines The Citizenship Of Black Americans

by Sally A. Nuamah

This book investigates the declining presence of public schools in large cities and its political consequences on the Americans most directly affected - poor Black citizens.

Go Back And Get It: A Memoir Of Race, Inheritance, And Intergenerational Healing

by Dionne Ford

Go Back and Get It combines the story of Dionne Ford's inner life with research and reflections on how racial trauma is generated, repeated, stored, and processed, what the cycle looks like and how it might be broken. It is a memoir about how, in the search for belonging, family can be a source of loneliness and even danger and also a true home.

Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations.

Let Us Descend: A Novel

by Jesmyn Ward

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march and turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.

Life And Other Love Songs

by Anissa Gray

A father's sudden disappearance exposes the private fears, dreams, longings, and joys of a Black American family in the late decades of the twentieth century. In a gripping narrative that moves from the Great Migration to 1970s Detroit and 1990s New York, we follow the hopes, triumphs, losses, and secrets that build up and tear apart an American family.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery To Freedom

by Llyon Woo

Presents the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled white man and William posing as "his" slave.

New Growth: The Art And Texture Of Black Hair

by Jasmine Nichole Cobb

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, "natural hair" has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness.

River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

A redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery. These are the stories of Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. But above all this is the story of Rachel and the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to find her children...and her freedom.

The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, The United Nations, And The Fight To End Empire


by Kal Raustiala

A wide-ranging political biography of diplomat, Nobel prize winner, and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche. A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten. In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history. He shows that Bunche was not only a singular figure in midcentury America; he was also one of the key architects of the postwar international order.

The Black Side Of The River: Race, Language, And Belonging In Washington, DC


by Jessica Grieser

In The Black Side of the River, sociolinguist Jessi Grieser conducts extensive interviews with Black Anacostia residents to examine what she terms "linguistic practices of place," or how people make sense of and give meaning to their physical space through their language use. In a neighborhood undergoing substantial class gentrification but still decisively Black, Grieser finds that Anacostians use language to assert a positive, hopeful place identity that is inextricably intertwined with their racial identity.

The Fire Next Time


by James Baldwin James

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document.

The Memory Librarian : And Other Stories of Dirty Computer

by Janelle Monáe

The Memory Librarian serves readers tales grounded in the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, but also reaching through to the worlds of memory and time within, and the stakes and power that exist in a world in which thoughts - as a means of self-conception - could be controlled or erased by a select few.

The Underground Railroad: A Novel

by Colson Whitehead

Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom