BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2021

With a nod to the strength and determination of her family’s matriarchs, entrepreneur and social activist Jodie Patterson shares her coming of age in 1980s Manhattan, her family's experience with racism and civil rights, and her life as the mother of five children, including a transgender son.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection.

Morgan Jerkins argues that while the Great Migration of Black Americans from their rural homes in the South to jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest provided Black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity. In this deeply personal exploration, Jerkins recreates her own ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories with the insights and recollections of Black people she met along the way.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection, and as an ebook and on audio.

For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this tradition Bettye Kearse would not have known that she is a descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen. In 1990, Kearse became the eighth-generation griotte for her family. Embarking on a journey of discovery—of her ancestors, the nation, and herself—she set out to confirm the information her ancestors had passed down. Part personal quest, part historical correction, The Other Madisons is the saga of an extraordinary American family told by a griotte in search of the whole story.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection.

The Yellow House chronicles Broom's family, her life growing up in New Orleans East, and the eventual demise of her beloved childhood home after Hurricane Katrina. Her part memoir, part commentary expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection, and as an ebook.

Having been sent away with her brother Bailey at the age of three to be raised by her grandmother, Maya Angelou felt largely abandoned by her parents during her formative years. She grew up calling her grandmother “Momma,” but as a young adult she was able to reestablish her connection with her mother. Pair a reading of Angelou’s deeply personal account of her childhood and coming of age (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) with her memoir about her complicated relationship with her mother (Mom & Me & Mom) for a fuller sense of the depth and complexity of her familial relationships and the unbreakable bond between mother and daughter.

Both titles are available for check out in our physical collection. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is also available as an ebook and on audio.

In her intimate memoir, former First Lady and “mom in chief” Michelle Obama chronicles the experiences that have shaped her—from her working-class childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work with Barack’s political career, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. Narrating with humor and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family’s history-making launch into the global limelight.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection, and as an ebook and on audio.

The youngest of five children, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith was raised in Northern California with limitless affection by her stay-at-home mother and engineer father. Sheltered by her community and family, Smith had little sense of her Black identity until she spent two "sweltering and long" weeks visiting relatives in Alabama. In college, she became "caught up in the conversation about Identity" and, feeling a desperate need to separate herself from her mother, she became judgmental about her mother's deep Christian faith. After her mother’s death from colon cancer, Smith searched for a more expansive way to understand their relationship, which she found in writing poetry. Ordinary Light is Smith’s nuanced memoir about her coming-of-age, set against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and family.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection.

The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants.

Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field’s epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements.

This work is an intricate, dense read, and might be best suited to audiences who would like a deeper, more detailed history that provides both critical context.

In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley—daughter of actress Lena Horne—delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African American family from Civil War to Civil Rights. Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. From Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement, this ambitious, brilliant family witnessed and participated in the most crucial events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This work is an intricate, dense read, and might be best suited to audiences who would like a deeper, more detailed history that provides both critical context.

This title is available for check out in our physical collection.