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 2019.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor
Jazz And Justice:
Racism and the Political Economy of the Music
by Gerald Horne
Monthly Review Press, 2019
Workers On Arrival:
Black Labor In The Making Of America
by Joe William Trotter, Jr.
University of California Press, 2019
White Flights:
Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination
by Jess Row
Graywolf Press, 2019
The Romare Bearden Reader
Edited by Robert G. O'Meally
Duke University Press, 2019
A Terrible Thing To Waste: Environmental Racism And Its Assault On The American Mind
by Harriet A. Washington
Little, Bown, Spark 2019
The Source of Self-Regard:
Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
by Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf. 2019
Jazz From Detroit
by Mark Stryker
University of Michigan Press, 2019
They Were Her Property: White Women As Slaveowners in the American South
by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Yale University Press, 2019
Stoney the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Penguin Press, 2019
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, 2019
How To Hide An Empire:
A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019
Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The University of North Carolina Press, 2019
Black Radical:
The Life And Times Of William Monroe Trotter
by Kerri K. Greenidge
Liveright Books, 2019
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics Of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland
by Jonathan M. Metzl
Basic Books, 2019
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade Of Changing The World
by Anand Giridharadas
Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
by Saidiya Hartman
W.W. Norton and Company, 2019
A Good American Family: The Red Scare And My Father
by David Maraniss
Simon and Schuster, 2019
The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas
Edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Laura Vrana
Wesleyan University Press, 2019
Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone
by Astra Taylor
Metropolitan Books, 2019
The Collected Poems Of Bertolt Brecht
Translated and Edited by
Tom Kuhn and David Constantine
Tom Kuhn and David Constantine
Liveright Books, 2019
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest
by Hanif Abdurraquib
University of Texas Press, 2019
Breathe: A Letter To My Sons
by Imani Perry
Beacon Press, 2019
The Terror Of the Unforseen
by Henry A. Giroux
Los Angeles Review Of Books, 2019
Sweat the Technique: Revelations On Creativity From the Lyrical Genius
by Rakim
Amistad, 2019
Art For People's Sake: Artists and Community In Black Chicago, 1965-1975
by Rebecca Zorach
Duke University Press, 2019
The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman
Edited by Nelli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye and Tate Swindell with foreword by Devorah Major
University Of Chicago Press, 2019
It's Always Loud in the Balcony: A Life in Black Theatre, From Harlem To Hollywood And Back
by Richard Wesley
Applause Books, 2019
KOCHLAND: The Secret History Of Koch Industries and Corporate Power In America
by Christopher Leonard
Simon and Schuster, 2019
Never A Lovely So Real: The Life And Work Of Nelson Algren
by Colin Asher
W.W. Norton and Company, 2019
The Selected Letters Of Ralph Ellison
Edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner
Random House, 2019
