Black History Month Materials Available in Mullins Library and Online (2024)

In celebration of Black History Month, Mullins Library staff have compiled a list of digital material available for all students, staff and faculty. Physical items are also available on display in Mullins Library on Level 4.

eBooks

Nonfiction

The New York Times Magazine's award-winning "1619 Project: a New Origin Story" issue places slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.

Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for 25 years, mostly to White people. With Teaching Black History to White People, which is "part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogyand part how-to guide," Moore delivers a primer on the Black experience in America.

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris sheds light on the ways that the education system pushes Black girls out of school and into the criminal justice system and offers solutions for creating a more inclusive and equitable environment.

Freedom Flyers: the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II brings to life the legacy of a determined, visionary cadre of African American airmen who proved their capabilities and patriotism, transformed the armed forcesand jump-started the modern struggle for racial equality.

Fiction

Passing is a novel by Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. This story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. T

The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires and expectations, and explores some of the reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Memoirs

A Promised Land by Barack Obama is a memoir that chronicles his journey from a community organizer to becoming the 44th president of the United States. The book provides insights into his policies, challenges and personal life, exploring the factors that influenced his presidency.

According to Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, his memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, is "the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of loveand who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."

Autobiographies

Ida B. Wells was one of the foremost crusaders against Black oppression. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells tells of her private life as mother of a growing family and her public activities as teacher, lecturer and journalist in her fight against attitudes and laws oppressing Black people.

Frederick Douglass is one of the most celebrated writers in the African American literary tradition, and his first autobiography is the one of the most widely read North American slave narratives. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave was published in 1845, less than seven years after Douglass escaped from slavery.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X charts Malcolm's life from his childhood in Michigan to his criminal days in Boston and New York. It continues to his adoption of the Muslim faith, his joining of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and his eventual break from the Nation of Islam.

Streaming Videos

Teach Us All examines how the present-day United States education system fails to live up to that promise of desegregation as it slides back into a re-segregation of its modern schools.

The Central Park Five tells the story of the five Black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989.

The documentary Souls of Black Girls explores how media images of beauty undercut the self-esteem of African American women.

W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voiceschronicles the long and remarkable life of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and offers unique insights into an eventful century in African American history. Born three years after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois witnessed the imposition of Jim Crow, its defeat by the Civil Rights Movement and the triumph of African independence struggles.

Freedom Riders tells the story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 Black and White Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.

Black Boysstrives for insight into Black identity and opportunity at the nexus of sports, education and criminal justice.

Inspired by the groundbreaking book of the same name by Monique W. Morris, Ed.D, Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools takes a deep dive into the lives of Black girls and the practices, cultural beliefs and policies that disrupt one of the most important factors in their lives — education.

Before there was a Civil Rights Movement in the Unites States of America, there were the actions of the Tuskegee Airmen. Many African American men and women were aviators in the early 1930s, but established military policy forbade them from flying. However, as World War II loomed, there was heavy pressure from Black organizations and leaders such as the NAACP, A. Phillip Randolph, W.E.B. DuBois and journalists to offer U.S. Army pilot training to Black United States citizens.