Essential Listening: Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racism

We Were Eight Years in Power

An American Tragedy

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrated by: Beresford Bennett
Length: 13 hours 37 minutes

In this “urgently relevant”* collection featuring the landmark essay “The Case for Reparations,” the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me “reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath”*—including the election of Donald Trump.

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book... Read more

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

By: Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 22 hours 40 minutes

“I'm sorry I hadn't gotten to this sooner. Wilkerson pulls together so much of what I already knew about the US but not necessarily why... a great audiobook, too. Read more

Hood Feminism

Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot

By: Mikki Kendall
Narrated by: Mikki Kendall
Length: 6 hours 57 minutes

“Hood Feminism touches on many subjects that mainstream feminists may not think of as feminist issues. Issues like food and housing insecurity, parenting, and disability rights, among others. Mikki Kendall calls out mainstream feminism as existing only for the advancement of white women, to the detriment of women of color. Some of my biggest... Read more

Pushout

The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

By: Monique W. Morris
Narrated by: Kristyl Dawn Tift
Length: 8 hours 54 minutes

Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school.



Just... Read more

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Crossing Press Feminist

By: Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action... Read more

Race for Profit

How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

By: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 12 hours 29 minutes

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

The Condemnation of Blackness

Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

By: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Narrated by: Mirron Willis
Length: 12 hours 43 minutes

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

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. Read more

The Bluest Eye

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

“Beautiful, gothic, and read by Morrison. Her voice is so wonderful in this audiobook. The use of repetition and imagery in this book is amazing!!! Read more

Native Son

By: Richard Wright
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 17 hours 44 minutes

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels“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.""The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath."" —The New YorkerWhen it was... Read more

Racism

A Very Short Introduction

By: Ali Rattansi
Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

From subtle discrimination in everyday life and scandals in politics, to incidents like lynchings in the American South, cultural imperialism, and 'ethnic cleansing', racism exists in many different forms, in almost every facet of society.



But what actually is race? How has racism come to be so firmly established? Why do so few people actually... Read more

She Came to Slay

The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman

By: Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Narrated by: Robin Miles & Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Length: 3 hours 52 minutes

“Excellent audio book that tells the heart breaking trials and Harriet Tubman from her early days to her last. She fought all the way to achieve Firefox for some and equally for all. Read more

You Can't Touch My Hair

And Other Things I Still Have to Explain

By: Phoebe Robinson
Narrated by: Phoebe Robinson, Jessica Williams & John Hodgman
Length: 7 hours 41 minutes

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • "A must-read…Phoebe Robinson discusses race and feminism in such a funny, real, and specific way, it penetrates your brain and stays with you." –Ilana Glazer, co-creator and co-star of Broad City

A hilarious and timely essay collection about race, gender, and pop culture from upcoming comedy superstar and 2 Dope... Read more

Long Walk to Freedom

The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

By: Nelson Mandela
Narrated by: Michael Boatman
Length: 27 hours 38 minutes

The autobiography of global human rights icon Nelson Mandela is "riveting . . . both a brilliant description of a diabolical system and a testament to the power of the spirit to transcend it" (Washington Post).
Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight... Read more

The Road to Dawn

Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War

By: Jared A. Brock
Narrated by: Jared A. Brock & Ryan Vincent Anderson
Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

A major literary moment: after being lost to history for more than a century, The Road to Dawn uncovers the incredible story of the real-life slave who inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin.

-He rescued 118 enslaved people
-He won a medal at the first World's Fair in London
-Queen Victoria invited him to Windsor Castle
-Rutherford B. Hayes entertained him... Read more

Sing, Unburied, Sing

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Chris Chalk & Rutina Wesley
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Sing, Unburied, Sing is a dark and gorgeous song of love and heartbreak, haunting and tragic and disorienting in its timelessness. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill anchors Ward's tale to Mississippi today, which is almost indistinguishable from its notorious yesterday, a present and past (ironically) made more alive in the novel by ghosts and... Read more

How We Fight For Our Lives

By: Saeed Jones
Narrated by: Saeed Jones
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

“Saeed Jones is supremely talented, so I expected his memoir to be great. I did NOT expect, however, to be left immobile in my chair after reading that final paragraph, processing the beauty of his words and those indelible sentences he’s generous enough to share with us. How We Fight for Our Lives is a moving and intimate portrait of the writer... Read more

The Hate U Give

By: Angie Thomas
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 50 minutes

“This bestselling, powerful young adult novel about social justice and one teen girl's effort to fight for what is right, will leave you breathless. The narration by Bahni Turpin is hands down the best I've ever heard. This is such an important book it should be required reading for life in general. Or listening. Definitely listening. Read more

Policing Black Lives

State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

By: Robyn Maynard
Narrated by: Marcia Johnson
Length: 12 hours 16 minutes

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and... Read more