The Condemnation of Blackness

By: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Narrated by: Mirron Willis
Length: 12 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Following the 1890 census—the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery—crime statistics, new... Read More »

Redefining Realness

By: Janet Mock
Narrated by: Janet Mock
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes
Abridged: No

With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman’s... Read More »

Men We Reaped

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Cherise Boothe
Length: 8 hours 42 minutes
Abridged: No

"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." --Harriet Tubman"In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life--to drugs, accidents, suicide,... Read More »

Race for Profit

By: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 12 hours 29 minutes
Abridged: No

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, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage... Read More »

Eloquent Rage

By: Brittney Cooper
Length: 6 hours 57 minutes
Abridged: No

"...Cooper delivers a frank, conversational-style examination of the importance of black female friendships, respectability politics, and harmful stereotypes, among other topics. She blends candor and humor as she roots out toxic behaviors and beliefs we use in America to tear ourselves and each other down, while also offering paths forward.... Read More »

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By: Maya Angelou
Narrated by: Maya Angelou
Length: 10 hours 10 minutes
Abridged: No

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute... Read More »

Heavy

By: Kiese Laymon
Length: 6 hours 17 minutes
Abridged: No

*Named a Best Book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics*

In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of... Read More »

The New Jim Crow

By: Michelle Alexander
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 13 hours 15 minutes
Abridged: No

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of... Read More »

Native Son

By: Richard Wright
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 17 hours 45 minutes
Abridged: No

Now an HBO Film!

“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” – Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was... Read More »

Me and White Supremacy

By: Layla F. Saad
Length: 5 hours 19 minutes
Abridged: No

Based off the original workbook, Me and White Supremacy teaches listeners how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.

When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never... Read More »

How We Fight For Our Lives

By: Saeed Jones
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE 2019 KIRKUS PRIZE IN NONFICTION

WINNER OF THE 2020 STONEWALL BOOK AWARD-ISRAEL FISHMAN NONFICTION AWARD

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2019

One of the best books of the year as selected by The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Elle; Kirkus Reviews; Publishers... Read More »

Hood Feminism

By: Mikki Kendall
Length: 6 hours 57 minutes
Abridged: No

"If Hood Feminism is a searing indictment of mainstream feminism, it is also an invitation. . . . [Kendall] offers guidance for how we can all do better."--NPR.org

"A rousing call to action for today's feminists. It should be required reading for everyone."--Gabrielle Union, author of We're Going to Need More Wine

A potent and electrifying... Read More »

How to Be an Antiracist

By: Ibram X. Kendi
Length: 10 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society—and in ourselves.

“The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”—The New York Times

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST... Read More »

When Affirmative Action Was White

By: Ira Katznelson
Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
Length: 8 hours 20 minutes
Abridged: No

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by... Read More »

The Bluest Eye

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.

It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so... Read More »