10 must-read classics by Black authors for Juneteenth

by Octavia Butler

🎧 Audiobook

“A modern Black woman is pulled through time to face the horrors of slavery in this ‘Great American Novel’ about racism, sexism and white supremacy—then and now.” (The Atlantic)

by Lorraine Hansberry

🎧 Audiobook

Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connect profoundly with the psyche of Black America—and changed American theater forever.

by Zora Neale Hurston

🎧 Audiobook

One of the most important and enduring books of the 20th century brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in Hurston’s writing. Out of print for almost 30 years—due largely to the initial audiences’ rejection of it’s strong black female protagonist, since its 1978 reissue has become one of the most widely read and highly acclaimed novels in the canon of African American literature.

by James Baldwin

🎧 Audiobook

This book galvanized the nation and gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

by Maya Angelou

🎧 Audiobook

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. Angelou’s unique telling captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right.

by Isabel Wilkerson

This beautifully written Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black Americans who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.

by W. E. B. Du Bois

🎧 Audiobook

This classic is the seminal work by DuBois on race in late 19th-century America. The way we think about and examine race today stems from his ideas. He spoke of the ‘double consciousness,’ this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’, and of the progress and obstacles to progress of the Black American.

by Malcolm X

This work stands as the definitive statement of a movement and man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. In revisiting his incisive perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, we gain extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.

by Alex Haley

🎧 Audiobook

Also available to watch as a four-part series on Kanopy.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning epic is a groundbreaking story of history and family that spanned continents and touched generations. The work galvanized the nation and created extraordinary political, racial, social, and cultural dialogue that still continues today.

RELATED READ: 9 powerful films to watch for Juneteenth on Kanopy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

🎧 Audiobook

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis.