New-ish Children’s, YA, and Adult Black History Books

This picture book is a companion of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, and tells the story of a little Black girl’s heritage through verse. It starts out with her in class, frustrated because she can not complete a school assignment where she has to trace her family history. Her grandmother tells her about her heritage, but starts in a flourishing West Africa that hasn’t yet been tainted by colonialism. What follows is the journey from an African home to American bondage, with many of the harsh details adapted to a younger audience. Four hundred years of Black American history is detailed, so it is condensed, but still worth a read, with an art style that is expressive and full of movement.

I was surprised when I first heard about this book because I had never heard about Tennessee’s Fayette County Tent City Movement . And… I’m from Tennessee, smh, but here we are. This is another book that combines poetry, prose, and illustrations to tell the story of the late 1950s in West Tennessee from a kid’s perspective. In Fayette County, Jim Crow ruled, with segregation and voter discrimination in full effect. When Black landowners organized voter registration drives to help other Black people to vote, the effort was met with violence. White landowners evicted Black sharecroppers, forcing them to live in tents, and shop owners refused to sell them groceries and other vital items. This all led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which legally ended voting discrimination.

This book is both a thoroughly researched and intimate account of the Black Panther Party from its inception in the late ’60s to its final offices being closed in the early ’80s. Iconic pictures of members and vital moments further flesh out the movement and show how the party was able to do things like provide free breakfast to thousands of school children, which FBI head J. Edgar Hoover tried to end by spreading the rumor to parents that the food would give their children STDs. The U.S. government would go on to establish a free breakfast program for kids that now feeds over 14 million students.

Ever since I moved to the Northeast as a native southerner, I’ve noticed how inaccurate the overall portrayal of the South is. Perry starts to set the record straight here in this book, which is equal parts memoir, history, and travel nonfiction. She addresses the nastiness of the South that is typically attributed to it (and for good reason), but also includes its beauty and how the U.S. as we know it today is rooted there. She journeys back home to Alabama to explore her ancestors, detouring to include artists, immigrants, and southerners from all walks of life. An interesting way, I think, that she describes the South is that it is “conservative in the sense of conservation.”

The author of Medical Apartheid is back to once again educate and infuriate. Washington shows how the conversation around Black, Indigenous, and Latine intelligence and achievement hasn’t been looked at correctly, and how environmental factors have been negatively influencing both these things for decades. She shows how it’s not just class-based, either, as middle-classed Black American households with incomes between $50,000-$60,000 live in areas that “are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes less than $10,000.” She gets into topics like neurotoxins, nutrition, birth control, and all other environmental factors that have resulted in public health issues for communities of color.