Let's Talk Race: A Book List Inspired by 1619

The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 brings together outstanding writing from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism. It features extraordinary globe-spanning journalism, including Sarah A. Topol on the genocide against the Rohingya ( New York Times Magazine ) and Erika Fry on the unintended consequences of a dengue fever vaccine ( Fortune ). In "India: Intimations of an Ending," Arundhati Roy excoriates the increasing authoritarianism under Modi ( The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center). A Q&A with Pamela Colloff accompanies her piece detailing prosecutors' reliance on an untrustworthy jailhouse informant ( New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica ), and a ProPublica series investigates the disaster that befell the USS Fitzgerald. The anthology showcases the work of remarkable stylists, including Jia Tolentino's cultural commentary ( New Yorker ) and Ligaya Mishan's columns on food and culture ( T: The New York Times Style Magazine ). Jordan Kisner visits a Martha Washington–themed debutante ball for The Believer , alongside a discussion with the magazine's editor in chief, Joshua Wolf Shenk. Columns by s.e. smith consider disability ( Catapult ), and the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark writes about art he can touch ( Poetry ). The anthology features excerpts from major projects that challenge American certitudes: the Washington Post Magazine 's "Prison" issue, detailing the scope of mass incarceration, and the New York Times Magazine' s "The 1619 Project," which recenters the nation's history around slavery and its legacies.

"A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 80 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas--and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines -- historians and artists, journalists and novelists--each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America"-- Provided by publisher.

Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

"The end of desegregation and the attainment of civil rights for South Carolina's African American community from the 1940s through the 1960s was a long and arduous struggle. Enduring lynchings, death threats, bombs, robed Klansmen, burning crosses, whippings, beatings, arson, and venemous hatred, African Americans from Upstate to the Lowcountry displayed astonishing courage, devotion, and commitment to gain equality. This book tells stories of those struggles. For the past fifteen years South Carolina journalist Claudia Smith Brinson has researched the history of civil rights in the Palmetto State and interviewed dozens of civil rights activists who risked their lives to make their communities better places: fair, equal, democratic, and respectful of all human beings. Many of these individuals had never told their stories-to anyone. These are stories of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins at stores, libraries, parks, and beaches. Brinson focuses on five case studies, reflecting individuals and actions that changed the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina but also reverberated throughout the South: the legal strategies of James Myles Hinton, Sr., the president of the South Conference of Branches of the NAACP in the 1940s and 50s; Joseph Armstrong Delaine and others involved in the Summerton's Briggs v. Elliott case in the early 1950s that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; Cecil Augustus Ivory, and the Freedom Riders in Rock Hill in 1960; the sit-ins that same year in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, and Columbia, in which thousands of African American studies were arrested and jailed; and the 1969 hospital strikes in Charleston at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital, during which dozens of women played key roles. And while these are stories from South Carolina's past, the journey to equality never ends--as recently as 2014 the SC Supreme Court, in Abbeville II, ruled that the state had failed in its constitutional duty to provide a minimally adequate education--but provided no remedy. The struggle endures"-- Provided by publisher.

In a landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Foner gives us a life of Lincoln as it intertwined with slavery, the defining issue of the time and the tragic hallmark of American history. The author demonstrates how Lincoln navigated a dynamic political landscape deftly, moving in measured steps, often on a path forged by abolitionists and radicals in his party, and that Lincoln's greatness lay in his capacity for moral and political growth.

"A stunning debut novel that delves fearlessly into the taboo subject of modern-day medical experimentation on African Americans"-- Provided by publisher.

"In Washing Our Hands in the Clouds, Bo Petersen masterfully crafts a reflection on the Civil War, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement in the personal story of how it affected one man's life in a specific South Carolina locale. Petersen's accomplishment is that, in studying the Pee Dee region of Dillon and Marion Counties, he illuminates those issues throughout the Deep South. Through conversations with Joe Williams, his family, and acquaintances, white and black, Petersen merges the Williams family history back to Joe's great-great-grandfather, Scipio Williams, with the lives and fortunes of four generations of South Carolinians--black and white. Scipio, the family progenitor, was a man free in spirit and action before the Civil War destroyed chattel slavery. Scipio was a free black farmer who worked land that he owned in the Pee Dee before and after the war and during the worst days of Jim Crow white supremacy. Petersen uses the Williams family genealogy, neighborhood, and, most important, their farmlands to understand Pee Dee and South Carolina history from the 1860s to the present. In his research he discovers historical currents that run deeper than events--currents of agriculture, land ownership, and allegiance to native soil--and transcend the march of time and carry the Williams family through slavery, war, Jim Crow, and economic dislocation to today's stories of Joe Williams. In gathering what Petersen describes as a collection of front porch stories, he also writes a history of what matters most to this family and this locale. The resulting narrative is surprising, unconventional, and true for all families in all places. In Dillon County, tobacco production followed cotton farming. Old-time logging coexisted with textile factories. Jim Crow gave way to uncertain prospects of racial harmony. Those were monumental changes of circumstance, but they did not change human character. Washing Our Hands in the Clouds is a history of human character, of life that endures outside of the restraints of time. To understand this phenomenon is to realize that both Scipio and Joe and the generations between them wash their hands in the timeless clouds of South Carolina's sky"-- Provided by publisher.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of--From publisher description.

"In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life..."--Container.