Thank you to our Contributors:

  • The staff at ATBHK
  • Thomas D. Clark Foundation
  • Muhammad Ali Center
  • Kentucky State University
  • Berea College
  • Kentucky Historical Society
  • Frazier Kentucky History Museum
  • The University Press of Kentucky (UPK)
  • Kentucky Department of Education
  • The Filson Historical Society

Essential Books on Race and Race Relations

We’ve asked Kentucky educators to recommend books about Black history and culture. Want to recommend a book? Contact us.

Copper Sun

For K-12 Students

By Sharon Draper

This book displays the epic story of a young girl who is torn from her African village, sold into enslavement, and stripped of everything she has ever known, except hope. Learn more.

A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America

For K-12 Students

By Ron Takaki

Using the experiences of real people to tell of their experiences, this book re-examines history through the lens of people whose stories and circumstances are too often ignored. Learn more.

Grandma’s Purse

For K-12 Students

By Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s

In this charming picture book, the author shows that when Grandma Mimi comes to visit, she always brings warm hugs, sweet treats, and her purse for her special granddaughter. Learn more.

Hidden Figures

For K-12 Students

By Margot Lee Shetterly’s

This book tells the phenomenal true story of the Black American female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Learn more. Learn more.

A Kids Book about Racism

For K-12 Students

By Jelani Memory

In this book you will find a clear description of what racism is, how it makes people feel when they experience it, and how to spot it when it happens. Learn more.

One Crazy Summer

For K-12 Students

By Rita Williams-Garcia

This inspirational book tells the story of three sisters who travel to Oakland, California, in 1968 to meet the mother who abandoned them. Learn more.

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

For K-12 Students

By Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi

This book helps us better understand why we are where we are based on the issue of race. Learn more.

Sulwe

For K-12 Students

By Lupita Nyong’o

In this critically acclaimed book, the author follows the story of a young girl who wishes for her dark skin to be lighter. The story is ultimately about colorism and learning to love oneself, no matter one’s skin tone. Learn more. 

We Rise We Resist We Raise Our Voices

By Cheryl Willis Hudson

In this captivating volume, the author collects the writings and views of fifty of the foremost diverse children’s authors and illustrators to answers the question – “In this divisive world, what shall we tell our children?” Learn more.

What were the Negro Leagues

For K-12 Students

By Varian Johnson

This outstanding book chronicles the history of the “Negro” Baseball leagues. Learn more. 

Beloved

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Toni Morrison

In this emotional story, Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Learn more.

Black Feminist Thought

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Patricia Hill Collins

In this outstanding volume, the author explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African American women outside academe. The author provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. 

Caste: The Origins for our Discontent

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Isabel Wilkerson

Considered by many reviewers a “must read,” this is Ms. Wilkerson’s acclaimed follow-up to The Warmth of Other Suns interprets America’s racism through the lens of caste. Learn more.

Death of the Innocence

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Mamie Till-Mosley’s

In this powerful and emotional book, the author displays the mother of Emmett Till recounting the story of her life, her son’s tragic death, and the dawn of the civil rights movement. Learn more.

Just Mercy

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Bryan Stevenson

In this powerful and emotional book, the author, a brilliant lawyer, tell a true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of criminal justice. Learn more.

The Invisible Man

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Ralph Ellison

This classic book examines the plight of a nameless narrator of the novel who describes growing up in a Black American community in the South, attending a Historically Black college from which he is expelled, moves to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood,” and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the “invisible man” he imagines himself to be. Learn more.

Killing Rage

For Adults / Mature Readers

By bell hooks

In this powerful volume, the author argues that eradicating racism and sexism must go hand in hand. Learn more.

The Miseducation of the Negro

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Carter G. Woodson

First published in 1933, this class study illustrates that Black Americans of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, the author concludes, caused Black Americans to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. Learn more.

Racism without Racists

For High School to College

By Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

This book explores the type of racism that exists in contemporary America. More specifically, the author defines this new type of racism as “color-blind racism” because it involves the perpetuation of white dominance and privilege in a more passive way than racism was carried out in the past, and often those who display color-blind racism think they are not racist. Learn more.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

For Adults / Mature Readers

By Isabel Wilkerson

A historical study of the Great Migration. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award among other accolades. Learn more.

What’s My Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States

For High School to College

By Dave Zirin

A collection of essays, profiles and inteviews about sports-activists. Zirin borrows the title from a quote by Muhamad Ali.  Learn more.

Why We Can’t Wait

For High School to College

By Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

In this classic book, the author explores, in great details, the various events
and forces behind the Civil Rights Movement, especially the situation that led to the author’s writing of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Learn more.

Women, Race, and Class

For High School to College

By Angela Davis

In this classic book, the author creates a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from abolitionist days to the present, which demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. Learn more.

Teaching Books

Educate Yourself

TeachingBooks

TeachingBooks was recommended by Tia Williams, who teaches grades P-5 in the Jefferson County Public School District. Tia’s comment: “Free site free for teachers for find texts and resources.”

Here are a few examples of books couple with lesson plans:

Reading Lists from other Sources

For Students & Educators

Reading Lists From Other Sources

Black/African-American Jockeys

For Students & Educators

The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia

For Students & Educators

The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia:  The story of African Americans in Kentucky is as diverse and vibrant as the state’s general history. The work of more than 150 writers, The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia is an essential guide to the black experience in the Commonwealth.

Civil Rights Series

For Students & Educators

Civil Rights Series:  Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality

Edited by: Steven F. Lawson, Cynthia G. Fleming, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries This series encourages the research and publication of original monographs that illuminate our understanding of the black struggle for political, economic, and social equality. It is our goal that the books published in this series will satisfy the highest standards of research, interpretation, and analysis. We actively solicit scholars to research and to write about overlooked aspects of black civil rights. As part of this series, we hope to include community studies, biographies, and examinations of the influence of the movement for black equality on race relations today.

Civil Rights & Southern History

For Students & Educators
Civil Rights & Southern History:   Exploring new topics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and culture, and contributing in important new ways to the historiography of the region, this series stimulates exploration, development, and use of non-traditional source materials, including material cultural sources, to add to our understanding of the relationship between the South and the rest of the nation.
Educate Yourself

The story of African Americans in Kentucky is as diverse and vibrant as the state’s general history. The work of more than 150 writers, The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia is an essential guide to the black experience in the Commonwealth.

The encyclopedia includes biographical sketches of politicians and community leaders as well as pioneers in art, science, and industry. Kentucky’s impact on the national scene is registered in an array of notable figures, such as writers William Wells Brown and bell hooks, reformers Bessie Lucas Allen and Shelby Lanier Jr., sports icons Muhammad Ali and Isaac Murphy, civil rights leaders Whitney Young Jr. and Georgia Powers, and entertainers Ernest Hogan, Helen Humes, and the Nappy Roots. Featuring entries on the individuals, events, places, organizations, movements, and institutions that have shaped the state’s history since its origins, the volume also includes topical essays on the civil rights movement, Eastern Kentucky coalfields, business, education, and women.

For researchers, students, and all who cherish local history, The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia is an indispensable reference that highlights the diversity of the state’s culture and history.

karla will make this 3 rows

For Students & Educators
  • The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia:  The story of African Americans in Kentucky is as diverse and vibrant as the state’s general history. The work of more than 150 writers, The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia is an essential guide to the black experience in the Commonwealth.
  • Civil Rights Series:  Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality
    Edited by: Steven F. Lawson, Cynthia G. Fleming, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries This series encourages the research and publication of original monographs that illuminate our understanding of the black struggle for political, economic, and social equality. It is our goal that the books published in this series will satisfy the highest standards of research, interpretation, and analysis. We actively solicit scholars to research and to write about overlooked aspects of black civil rights. As part of this series, we hope to include community studies, biographies, and examinations of the influence of the movement for black equality on race relations today.
  • Civil Rights & Southern History:   Exploring new topics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and culture, and contributing in important new ways to the historiography of the region, this series stimulates exploration, development, and use of non-traditional source materials, including material cultural sources, to add to our understanding of the relationship between the South and the rest of the nation.