LibGuides: HIST 30: Black Civil Rights through Film, Art & History: American History from the Perspective of the Black Experience, 1940s–2020s

American History from the Perspective of the Black Experience, 1940s–2020s

A list of essays, short fiction, poems, and a play that can be used for the Analytical Project. This list is not exhaustive. It is possible to choose works by these authors that are not listed here.

This guide lists links to access books in three libraries: Hofstra, Nassau County Libraries, and the New York Public Library. Hofstra students can get cards for Nassau Libraries and NYPL. See the tab "Find Books in 3 Libraries" in this guide.

Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play. New York: Vintage International, 1992.

Play. A white man’s murder of a young Black man in a Southern town ignites a brutal reckoning with racism, justice, and moral decay.

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Baldwin, James. “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.” In The Fire Next Time, 39–105. Dial Press, 1993.

Essay. A sweeping meditation on race, religion, and the historical paralysis of a nation unable to face its original sin.

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Baldwin, James. “Many Thousands Gone.” In Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, 1955.

Essay. Baldwin dismantles white liberal fantasies about racial progress, situating midcentury Black life within the ongoing continuum of American hypocrisy.

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Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” In Notes of a Native Son, 71–98. Beacon Press, 1955.

Essay. A son grapples with grief and rage after his father’s death and a Harlem riot, confronting how personal loss and racial hatred intertwine in a divided America.

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Baldwin, James. “Previous Condition.” In Going to Meet the Man, 83–102. Vintage Books, 1965.

Short fiction. Set in 1950s New York, the story exposes how prejudice and housing discrimination define the modern Black experience.

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Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” In Going to Meet the Man, 103–141. Vintage Books, 1965.

Short fiction. Through the story of two Harlem brothers, Baldwin chronicles postwar Black life as a mix of inherited sorrow and creative resistance.

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Baldwin, James. “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon.” In Going to Meet the Man, 143–178. Vintage Books, 1965.

Short fiction. An expatriate artist’s return to America becomes a reckoning with the weight of its racial past and the illusions of escape.

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Baldwin, James. “Amen.” In Jimmy’s Blues: Selected Poems. St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Poem. The poem’s sermon-like cadence turns American religiosity back on itself, exposing how faith and history intertwine in the nation’s racial sins.

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Baldwin, James. “Staggerlee Wonders.” In Jimmy’s Blues: Selected Poems. St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Poem. Baldwin reframes the folk figure Staggerlee as a witness to the betrayals and unfinished revolutions of twentieth-century America, surveying Black life against the hollow promise of democracy.

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Notes from the Eighth Year: My President Was Black.” In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.

Essay. Interprets Barack Obama’s presidency as both culmination and complication of twentieth-century Black struggle, charting how hope and backlash coexist in modern American history.

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Notes from the Fourth Year: The Legacy of Malcolm X.” In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.

Essay. Traces Malcolm X’s evolving historical image to show how radical visions of self-determination have shaped—and unsettled—America’s racial imagination across decades.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Bearing the Flaming Cross.” Part 3 of The Message. Random House, 2024.

Essay. A reflection on the violent legacy of white supremacy in America, it examines how racist terror, both historical and ongoing, shapes Black identity and the nation’s moral failures..

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hooks, bell. “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 165–178. South End Press, 1992.

Essay. Reverses the racial gaze to historicize how Black consciousness has always theorized power and survival.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. “Crazy for This Democracy.”

Essay. A sardonic critique of American democracy’s racial hypocrisy written at midcentury but burning with contemporary resonance.

In You Don’t Know Us Negroes: And Other Essays, 251–254. Amistad, 2022.

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Also in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 165–168. Feminist Press, 1979.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

Essay. Hurston’s exuberant assertion of selfhood dismantles narratives of victimhood and redefines Black identity as creative, historical agency.

In You Don’t Know Us Negroes: And Other Essays, 186–190. Amistad, 2022.

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Also in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 152–155. Feminist Press, 1979.

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Morrison, Toni. “Romancing the Shadow.” In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 29–59. Harvard University Press, 1992.

Essay. Dissects how canonical American literature uses the presence of Blackness to define the moral and imaginative limits of the nation.

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Whitehead, Colson. “The Match.” The New Yorker, April 1, 2019, 14–20.

Short fiction. Haunted by the physical traces of violence, this story probes how history lingers in bodies and landscapes long after the era of legal segregation.

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Wright, Richard. “12 Million Black Voices.” In The Richard Wright Reader, 144–241. Harper & Row, 1978.

Essay. Blends documentary narrative and prophetic prose to chart African American migration, resilience, and the unfinished transformation of the nation.

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Wright, Richard. “Black Boy” (excerpt). In The Richard Wright Reader, 3–30. Harper & Row, 1978.

Essay. A personal chronicle of growing up under Jim Crow that becomes a collective history of awakening and defiance.

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Wright, Richard. “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite.” In The Richard Wright Reader, 31–35. Harper & Row, 1978.

Essay. Interprets a single boxing match as a national revelation of suppressed racial tensions in Depression-era America.

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Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Lived Underground.”

Short fiction. Through the surreal odyssey of a falsely accused man hiding in the city’s sewers, Wright transforms a tale of individual persecution into an allegory of Black existence beneath the surface of American history, where truth, guilt, and survival run in the same dark current.

In Eight Men: Short Stories, 113–172. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1987.

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Also in The Richard Wright Reader, 517–576. Harper & Row, 1978.

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Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.” In Eight Men: Short Stories, 11–26. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1987.

Short fiction. A teenage boy’s yearning for respect and power becomes a fable of racial hierarchy and the false promise of manhood in the Jim Crow South.

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