Please Note: The following list of books is not organized according to any personal hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of the very best writing published in the United States in 2013.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor
Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II
by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Basic Civitas, 2013
The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop
by Guthrie P. Ramsey
University of California Press, 2013
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education And Was Shot By The Taliban
by Malala Yousafzai (with Christina Lamb)
Little Brown and Company, 2013
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins Of Our Time
by Ira Katznelson
W.W. Norton & Company (Liveright Publishing Corporation), 2013
Mingus Speaks
by John F. Goodman
University of California Press, 2013
Paul Robeson: A Watched Man
by Jordan Goodman
Verso, 2013
The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks
by Jeanne Theoharis
Beacon Press, 2013
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
by Stanley Crouch
Harper, 2013
Black Against Empire: The History And Politics Of The Black Panther Party
by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.
University of California Press, 2013
Mo' Meta Blues: The World According To Questlove
by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson (with Ben Greenman)
Grand Central Publishing, 2013
Toussaint Louverture: The Story of The Only Successful Slave Revolt In History (A Play in Three Acts)
by C.L.R. James
Duke University Press, 2013
Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement
by Minrose Gwin
University of Georgia Press, 2013
Told You So: The Big Book Of Weekly Columns
by Ralph Nader
Seven Stories Press, 2013
FOR Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and The Law
by Randall Kennedy
Pantheon Books, 2013
Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities
by Craig Steven Wilder
Eslanda: The Large And Unconventional Life Of Mrs. Paul Robeson
by Barbara Ransby
Yale University Press, 2013
Blacks In and Out Of The Left
by Michael C. Dawson
Harvard University Press, 2013
Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-in Violence and the Persistence Of Racial Segregation In American Housing
by Jeannine Bell
New York University Press, 2013
A Black Revolutionary's Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit
by Michael Hamlin (with Michele Gibbs)
Against the Tide, 2013
The American Way of Poverty: How The Other Half Still Lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Nation Books, 2013
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela
by Danny Schechter
Seven Stories Press, 2013
Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy
by Gary May
Basic Books, 2013
The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild
by Hannah Rothschild
Alfred A. Knopf, 2013
My Beloved World
by Sonia Sotomayor
Alfred A. Knopf, 2013
March On Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights
by William P. Jones
W.W. Norton. 2013
Ella Baker: Community Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement
by J. Todd Moye
Rowman & Littlefield (The Library of African American Biography), 2013
