Since at least the 2000s, Black historians, journalists, and scholars have enriched my understanding of Black History Month with notable audios too numerous to mention. My favorite listens celebrate the contributions of Black Americans and African Americans to our common history, and offer a personal lens to point the way forward from here. And, of course, my favorite listens also feature amazing narrators and performances. Enjoy!
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A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present....
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present....
James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race....
The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native....
An essential journey through the American South—and the way it defines American identity—from one of our most extraordinary writers on race and culture at work today....
Few historical figures are as frequently whitewashed and misrepresented as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—his legacy as an agitator for necessary, radical change is often forgotten or ignored. The Radical King offers listeners the opportunity to hear King’s speeches, as organized and edited by activist Cornel West, in the voices of an assortment of Black artists and performers....
From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress....
A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade....
Winner of the IACP Award for Culinary History. Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris weaves an utterly engaging history of African American cuisine, taking the listener on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, and tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way....
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history....
Pulitzer Prize, History, 2009; National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2008. This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826....
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968....
National Book Award Winner; New York Times best seller. A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives....
Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touchpoints in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes listeners to the white-hot center of this fight....
