Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2009.
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Penguin Random House, 1994.
A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving 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.

Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying.Penguin Random House, 1997.
From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.

Johnson, Mat. Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery. Berger Books, 2018.
In the early 20th Century, when lynchings were commonplace throughout the American South, a few courageous reporters from the North risked their lives to expose these atrocities. They were African-American men who, due to their light skin color, could “pass” among the white folks. They called this dangerous assignment going “incognegro. Zane Pinchback, a reporter for the New York-based New Holland Herald, is sent to investigate the arrest of his own brother, charged with the brutal murder of a white woman in Mississippi. With a lynch mob already swarming, Zane must stay “incognegro” long enough to uncover the truth behind the murder in order to save his brother — and himself.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. HarperCollins, 2002.
One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Penguin Random House, 2006.
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s enduring masterpiece.

Perkins, Kathy A, ed. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Indiana University Press, 1998.
This anthology is the first to address the impact of lynching on U.S. theater and culture. By focusing on women’s unique view of lynching, this collection of plays reveals a social history of interracial cooperation between black and white women and an artistic tradition that continues to evolve through the work of African American women artists. Included are plays spanning the period 1916 to 1994 from playwrights such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Lillian Smith, and Michon Boston.

Tuccelli, Jessica Maria. Glow. Penguin Books, 2013.
Told in five unforgettable voices, Glow reaches back through the generations, from the red-clay dust of the Great Depression to the Blue Ridge frontier of 1836, where slave plantations adjoin the haunted glades of a razed Cherokee Nation. Out of these characters’ lives evolves a drama that is at once intimately human and majestic in its power to call upon the great themes of our time—race, identity, and the bonds of family and community.

Valent, Jennifer Erin. Catching Moondrops. E-book ed., Tyndale, 2010.
Jessilyn Lassiter no longer has to convince people she’s not a child. Having just turned 19 in the summer of 1938, her love for Luke Talley has never been more real. And Luke is finally beginning to care for her in the way she’s always dreamed of. But their budding romance is interrupted when Tal Pritchett—a young, black doctor—comes to Calloway, stealing the heart of Jessilyn’s best friend, Gemma, and stirring up the racial prejudice that has been simmering just beneath the town’s surface. The tension starts to bubble over when Jessie’s elderly neighbor Miss Cleta becomes the first white townsperson to accept Tal’s treatment. And when a young black man is lynched, Calloway is brought to its knees once again as Jessilyn realizes that her anger can make her heart as full of hate as the klan members who have terrorized her town and her family.

Whitehead, Colson. The Nickel Boys.Doubleday, 2019.
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men."

Williams, John A. The Man Who Cried I Am.Kindle ed., The Overlook Press, 2016.
From the streets of New York City to the jazz clubs of Paris and Amsterdam, from the battlefields of World War II to the Oval Office, Max’s journey as an African American author and journalist has brought him into the nexus of hypocrisy and duplicity surrounding segregation and civil rights time and again. But nothing he has encountered could have prepared him for the devastating and dangerous truth he now faces.Through the eyes of Max, with penetrating fictional portraits of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, among other historical figures, author John A. Williams reveals the hope, courage, and bitter disappointment of African American intellectuals in the postwar era.

Wilson, L. Lamar.Sacrilegion. Carolina Wren Press, 2013.
L. Lamar Wilson's award winning collection of poems exploring identity, sex, religion, history, racism and the paradoxes that emerge within their connections. Included is the poem Resurrection Sunday, a primary source of The Changing Same.