Locking Up Our Own

By: James Forman, Jr.
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 8 hours 39 minutes
Abridged: No

n original and consequential argument about race, crime, and the law Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics-and their impact on people of color-are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking... 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes
Abridged: No

“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love... 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 »

Between the World and Me

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Length: 3 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
 
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a... Read More »

Racism

By: Ali Rattansi
Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes
Abridged: No

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 »

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 »

How We Fight For Our Lives

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

From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.

One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The... 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 »

Stamped from the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

By: Ibram X. Kendi
Narrated by: Christopher Dontrell Piper
Length: 18 hours 32 minutes
Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IN RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS

FINALIST FOR THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION

THE MOST AMBITIOUS BOOK OF 2016 —The Washington Post

A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2016

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2016

A CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS BEST... Read More »