BlackReads Collection: Celebrating Black Stories

Published to mixed reception, Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring is a controversial take on the realities of Black life in the shadow of a c...

Lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fishers' characters...

Lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fishers' characters...

Married to a successful physician and prominently ensconced in Harlem's vibrant society of the 1920s, Irene Redfield leads a charmed existence-un...

What would happen if Marcus Garvey had achieved his dreams by force? Satirizing one of the most influential figures of twentieth century Black Amer...

Frederick Douglass: A Biography (1899) is a book by African American author, lawyer, and political activist Charles Chesnutt. While he is more wide...

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is the autobiography of Mary Seacole. Recognized for her pioneering healthcare work for s...

A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture (1798) is an autobiography by Venture Smith. Written while Smith was living in freedom on his own...

"M.W. Gibbs recalls a life of myriad transformations-from a youth of poverty to success in gold rush California to election as the first black muni...

A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912) is a memoir by Matthew Henson. Published a few years following an expedition to the planet's northernmost...

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is the autobiography of Mary Seacole. Recognized for her pioneering healthcare work for s...

The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916) is an etiquette book by Emma Azalia Hackley. Published toward the end of her life, The Colored Girl Beautiful dra...

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (1852) is a novella by Frederick Douglass. Having escaped from slavery in the South at a young age, Fred...

The Comet (1920) is a science fiction story by W. E. B. Du Bois. Written while the author was using his role at The Crisis, the official magazine...

Sweeping across African American history and culture in the shadow of slavery and ongoing racism, The Souls of Black Folk laid bare challenging iss...

Of One Blood (1902-1903) is a novel by Pauline E. Hopkins. Recognized as one of the earliest works of science fiction by an African American writer...

A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912) is a memoir by Matthew Henson. Published a few years following an expedition to the planet's northernmost...

Written while Nat Love was living in California, this autobiography is an invaluable record of the wildness of the American West in the final decad...

The Collected Poems and Prose of Jupiter Hammon compiles the works of Jupiter Hammon, America's first published black writer. When his poem "An Eve...