A Deeper South Bookshelf

This is a list of some of the books that have profoundly informed my work here at A Deeper South. I will update this regularly and add links, but in the meantime, here is a list of Black-owned bookstores. Look for one in your town.

Otherwise, you can shop all the books below on the ADS Bookstore powered by Bookshop.org. Doing so supports both independent booksellers and the work of ADS.

These books range between the academic and general-interest, from the broad to the very specific. If you are looking for an accessible entry point into this literature, I highly recommend Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name.

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Arnold, Edwin T. What Virtue There is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens, GA: University of Georgia 2012).

Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage 1992).

Baldwin, James, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage 2010).

Baptist, David E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books 2016)

Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Vintage 2008).

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard 2001).

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster 1988).

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster 1998).

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster 2006).

Burns, Rebecca. Rage in the Gate City: The Story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (Athens, GA: UGA Press, 2009).

Carmer, Carl. Stars Fell on Alabama (New York: Blue Ribbon 1934).

Cunningham, David. Klansville, U.S.A: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan (Oxford: OUP 2014).

Dray, Phillip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2002).

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York; Free Press, 1998)

Du Bois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk (New York: Library of America 1990).

Eubanks, W. Ralph. A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape (Portland, OR: Timber Press 2021).

Foner, Eric. The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: Norton 2019).

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper Collins 2014).

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row 1990).

Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Perennial 2004).

Green, Victor Hugo. The Negro-Motorist Green Book [1940 Facsimile Edition] (Camarillo, CA: About Comics 2016).

Greene, Melissa Fay. Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Non-fiction (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo 1991).

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Vintage 1999).

Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam 1990)

Hayes, John. Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South (Chapel Hill: UNC 2017)

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Vintage 1998).

Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: NYU 2010).

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale 2011).

Kenan, Randall. Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Alfred A. Knopf 1999).

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books 2016).

Kendi, Ibram X., and Keisha N. Blain, eds. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (New York: One World, 2021).

King, Gilbert. Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (New York: Harper Perennial 2013).

Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton 2005).

Kytle, Ethan J. and Blain Roberts. Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (New York: The New Press 2018)

Landrieu, Mitch. In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History (New York: Penguin 2018).

Lauterbach, Preston. Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company 2020).

Leamer, Laurence. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan (New York: HarperCollins 2016).

Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage 2010).

Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Delta 1993).

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster 2013).

Mann, Sally. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Back Bay Books 2015).

Masur, Kate. Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton & Company 2021).

Matthews, Donald. At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South (Cambridge: CUP 2018)

Murray, Albert. Collected Essays & Memoirs (New York: Library of America, 2016)

Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019).

Oney, Steve. And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: VIntage, 2003).

Oshinsky, David M. “Worse than Slavery:” Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press 1996).

Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in Georgia (New York: Norton 2017).

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton 2017).

Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton 1949; 1994)

Sokol, Jason. There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Vintage 2007)

Terkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (New York: Anchor 1992).

Tisby, Jemar. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 2019).

Twitty, Michael W. The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (New York: HarperCollins 2017).

Tyson, Timothy B. Blood Done Sign My Name (New York: Three Rivers 2004).

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster 2017).

Wells, Ida B. The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (New York: Penguin 2014).

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Penguin 2011).

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause 1865-1920 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press 2009).

Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History (New York: Vintage 1966)

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: OUP 2001).

Zinn, Howard, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Chicago: Haymarket 2017).