Racial Healing Commission - Suggested Reading Lists - Adults

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Racial Healing Commission Suggested Reading List

Nonfiction:

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman

Waking Up White by Debby Irving

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America by Jim Wallis

Black Cloud Rising by David Wright Falade

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World by Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill

Ripe Fields: The Promise and Challenge of Latino Ministry by Juan Oliver

Beyond the Messy Truth by Van Jones

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

The Great Migration: Journey to the North by Eloise Greenfield

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson

SAY IT LOUD! On Race, Law, History and Culture by Randall Kennedy

The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle by Malinda Maynor Lowery

Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.

The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Spirituals and the Blues by James H. Cone

My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

Memoirs:

Going to School in Black and White: A Dual Memoir of Desegregation by Cindy Waszak Geary and Lahoma Smith Romocki

The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Fiction:

JAMES: A Novel by Percival Everett

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

Hell of a Book: A Novel by Jason Mott

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash