Library blog

Black History Month: Digging Deeper with Books from the Library

February is celebrated nationally as Black History Month, so the library has almost always had a display showcasing the books and DVDs from our collection that tell important stories about how African Americans have been oppressed but struggled against it--and still thrived and contributed greatly to the history of the United States (and the world).  Last year's display (2021) focused on African American authors (with a few African authors and authors with African roots writing in English but not from the U.S.) and their contributions to literature (American literature and world literature).  You can see the lists of print books and ebooks we have by those authors here: https://guides.centralpenn.edu/Newitems/blackwriters

This year, our display includes both our general books on black history (e.g. collections of biographies and overall histories of the black experience in the United States) as well as titles that focus on lesser-known people, time periods, and/or movements that helped pave the way for greater equality and recognition for all people in this country.  (There are still plenty of problems to be solved, but those are topics of other blog posts.) 

Check out the titles and their brief descriptions below to dig deeper into black history and its impact.  You can see the full list of items on display (and another list of ebooks about Black history) on our guide: https://guides.centralpenn.edu/Newitems/blackhistory

African Americans of Harrisburg by John Weldon Scott; Eric Ledell Smith; African American Museum of Harrisburg Staff

Call Number: 974.8 SCO

ISBN: 9780738536682

Publication Date: 2005

"African Americans of Harrisburg documents the history of the African American community in this town. Harrisburg served as a refuge and passageway for many African Americans fleeing the South via the Underground Railroad and moving north in search of freedom and a better way of life. [This book] opens the door to this culturally diverse city of the wealthy, middle class, and poor with every possible race, religion, ethnicity, and lifestyle, which makes the fabric of the community so rich."

Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott

Call Number: Ebook Central

ISBN: 9780231545211

Publication Date: 2019

"Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores this rich period of black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women.
Banking on Freedom offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including extralegal violence and aggressive oversight from state actors who saw black economic autonomy as a threat to both democratic capitalism and the social order. The teller cage and boardroom became sites of activism and resistance as the leadership of president Maggie Lena Walker and other women board members kept the bank grounded in meeting the needs of working-class black women. The first book to center black women’s engagement with the elite sectors of banking, finance, and insurance, Banking on Freedom reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society."

Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860-1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary by Michael E. Lomax

Call Number: 796.357 LOM 1860-1901

ISBN: 9780815607861

Publication Date: 2003

"An account of the birth of black baseball and its dramatic passage from grass-roots venture to commercial enterprise. It assesses the impact of urbanization and migration, and applauds those innovators who forged black baseball into a parallel club that also appealed to whites."

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

Call Number: 303.484 GIL

ISBN: 9780393335323

Publication Date: 2009

"The civil rights movement that looms over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This rich history of that early movement introduces us to a contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals who employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights."

The Entrepreneurial Spirit of African American Inventors by Patricia Carter Sluby

Call Number: 338.642 SLU

ISBN: 9780313363351

Publication Date: 2011

"This book not only documents the valuable contributions of African American thinkers, inventors, and entrepreneurs past and present, but also puts these achievements into context of the obstacles these innovators faced because of their race."

Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War by Linda Hervieux

Call Number: 940.5412 HER

ISBN: 9780062313799

Publication Date: 2015

"In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive. The nation’s highest decoration was not given to Black soldiers in World War II.

Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their families, Linda Hervieux tells the story of these heroic men charged with an extraordinary mission, whose contributions to one of the most celebrated events in modern history have been overlooked. Members of the 320th—Wilson Monk, a jack-of-all-trades from Atlantic City; Henry Parham, the son of sharecroppers from rural Virginia; William Dabney, an eager 17-year-old from Roanoke, Virginia; Samuel Mattison, a charming romantic from Columbus, Ohio—and thousands of other African Americans were sent abroad to fight for liberties denied them at home. In England and Europe, these soldiers discovered freedom they had not known in a homeland that treated them as second-class citizens—experiences they carried back to America, fueling the budding civil rights movement."

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

Call Number: 510.9252 LEE

ISBN: 9780062363596

Publication Date: 2016

"The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space—a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens."

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Call Number: 616.0277 SKL

ISBN: 9781400052172

Publication Date: 2010

"Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which 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, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. 

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—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."

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen L. Carter

Call Number: 921 CAR

ISBN: 9781250121974

Publication Date: 2018

"She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s―and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.

Eunice Hunton Carter, [the author's] grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s, her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who―together with his friend Dashiell Hammett―would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed."

On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A'Lelia Bundles

Call Number: 338.7668 BUN

ISBN: 9780743431729

Publication Date: 2002

The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson [1896-1907] by Blair L. M. Kelley

Call Number: 323.1196 KEL

ISBN: 9780807833544

Publication Date: 2010

"Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance."

Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks Of Boston And How Their Struggle For Equality Changed America by Stephen Kendrick; Paul Kendrick

Call Number: 305.896 KEN

ISBN: 9780807050187

Publication Date: 2004

"One fall day in 1848, on windswept Beacon Hill in Boston, a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts walked past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded all-black Abiel Smith School. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, Benjamin Roberts resolved to sue the city of Boston on her behalf.
Thus began what would be a more than one-hundred-year struggle that culminated in 1954 with the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate America's schools. Today, few have heard of the Roberts case or of the black abolitionist printer whose love for his daughter started it all, but now, with Sarah's Long Walk, readers can learn about one black community's heroic struggle for equality.
Sarah's Long Walk recovers the stories of white and black Boston; of Beacon Hill in the nineteenth century; of twenty-four-year-old Robert Morris, the black lawyer who tried the case; and of all the people who participated in this early struggle to desegregate Boston's schools."