Looking for books relating to Civil Rights/Racial Injustice

The Color of Law

Here are some ideas:

– **Inheritance** by Baynard Woods. Woods wrote this book after he found out that a family legend about a heroic ancestor had actually been a massacre of 9 Black people by that ancestor, who was a white supremicist. It’s a really raw and deeply personal account of one man’s struggle to come to grips with the sins of his family and what, if anything, he can do to make things right. Though it’d be a great plot for a fiction, it is non-fiction. He also wrote **I Got a Monster,** which is a non-fiction account of a racist and criminal police squad in Boston, but I haven’t read it so I can’t technically recommend it, but I like the author a great deal.

– **Nobody’s Child** by Susan Vinocour. This book traces the codified and case law which defines “insanity” criminal defenses back to its roots in Victorian Britain. The author’s thesis – which I think she defends well – is that the use of the insanity defense now is profoundly shaped by the racist, classist, and ableist sentiments that were all taken for granted 200 years ago.

– **Three Generations, No Imbeciles** by Paul Lombardo. This book is organized around a 1927 Supreme Court case (Buck v. Bell) that allowed the state to sterilize individuals who are sufficiently mentally incompetent. Generally considered the worst decision of the Holmes Court, this book examines the often overlooked role that eugenics played in early 20th-century America.

– **The Arc of a Covenant** by Walter Mead. This one probably wouldn’t make the list but for the current crisis in Gaza. This is an interesting and well-researched examination of the US’s complex relationship with Israel, and how that relationship has shaped domestic and foreign policy. It isn’t directly about civil rights or racial injustice, but it goes to the heart of American identity, which has an outsized role in how we view and treat others. *Warning: Given the deeply divisive nature of the current Israel-Palestine debate, I recommend you research this book (and any other book with a similar subject) more thoroughly before you decide to read it. I personally think this is a fairly even-handed examination, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be parts you find offensive.*

– Pretty much anything by **Ta-Nahisi Coates.** Pretty much all his books examine Blackness in the American cultural and legal landscape we find ourselves in. He currently is speaking out with pro-Palestinian causes, but almost all his books focus on Civil Rights for Black people in America. He is somewhat polarizing – some on the American right feel that his commentary is less accurate than he would lead you to believe, but no one can argue that he isn’t a profoundly influential voice today.

– **How to be Antiracist** by Jason Hamilton. This is a book for people who don’t want to just learn about racial justice, but actually want to implement it in their own lives. This gives practical advice for changes you can make in your everyday life to have a real (if small) effect on racism in America.

– **Killers of the Flower Moon** by David Grann. Here is a summary I copied and pasted since my description kept getting too long lol: Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the brutal murders behind white settlers’ attempted dispossession of an Osage family’s Oklahoma lands, under which lay some of the world’s most valuable oil fields. That this conspiracy of theft, terror, and genocide helped launch J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI deepens the narrative’s moral complexity. Structured taut as a noir, researched like an indictment, and written with hard-boiled empathy, the book leaves us to wonder at the unresolved and unrecorded crimes against Native Americans.

– **The Color of Law** by Richard Rothstein. This is a review of the very racist – and very legal – practice of redlining, which put Black Americans at huge disadvantages in the quest to join the middle class and buy property. Though it’s no longer legal, it’s effects are still felt today.

– **Invisible** by Stephen Carter. This is the fascinating story of Eugenice Carter (the author’s grandma), a brilliant lawyer in the 1930s (and the grandchild herself of slaves) who arguably single-handedly brought down the most powerful mafia don in America.

– **The Hate U Give** by Angie Thomas. While it’s technically fiction, it is based on a very real phenomenon. The main character is a 16-year-old Black girl who splits her time between the poor community she lives in and the very white private school she attends. She has figured out how to change herself depending on where she is, until her best childhood friend is killed by a police officer. As the neighborhood and nation descend on the tragedy with shouting on both sides, the main character must face her own personal reckoning.

– **The South Was Right!** by Ronald Kennedy. I personally feel that a refusal to even attempt to empathize (not sympathize) with those who have opposing views – even extreme ones – makes it difficult to fix whatever the actual problem is. I vehemently disagree with this book, but I also think that it speaks to the cause of Christian Southern Nationalism with a harsh clarity needed in our current political climate. If you decide to read it, I suggest attempting to get it from your library or a used book store so that you don’t financially support this view.

– **Dying of Whiteness** by Jonathon Metzl. Written in 2019, this book explores – with compelling evidence – the white backlash policies implemented at the end of Obama’s administration have profound and negative effects on the very people who support them.

– **White Benevolence** by Gebhard. I ended up reading this after attending a lecture on a university campus that had, in decades past, been a reform institution for Indigenous youth. This was very common in many parts of the early US – missionaries and progressives would fund and run schools meant to teach the “savagery” of Indigenous cultures out of children so they could integrate into the European colonialist culture taking over the country. This is an important account of how racism can be so deeply embedded in one’s psyche that its affects can be even more devastating than obvious racism.

– **Whiteout** by Helen Hansen. I picked this book up after a well-known comedian pointed out the hypocrisy of how America reacted to the crack epidemic in the 1990s (which seemed to target poorer Black communities) and the opioid epidemic (which is most prevalent in poorer white communities). This book doesn’t spend much time on that comparison, but it does trace political and cultural assumptions of race that brought us to our current situation.

– **Crook County** by Nicole van Cleve. The author spent about 1000 hours observing cases in various stages in the Cook County Courthouse – the largest criminal courthouse in the US (it’s in Chicago). It’s an incisive look at how racism manifests in a million different tiny ways, leading to vastly different outcomes, even though racism has been almost completely removed from any codified procedural law.

– **Lies My Teacher Told Me** by James Loewen. A critique and retelling of the American history we tell ourselves and each other, with a specific focus on race in America.