Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls' Rising: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995).
Madison Smartt Bell, Master of the Crossroads: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).
Madison Smartt Bell, The Stone That the Builder Refused: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).
William Wells Brown, Clotel and Other Writings, edited by Ezra Greenspan (New York: Library of America, 2014) (From Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in The United States: "Get as much education as possible for yourselves and your children. An ignorant people can never be truly free until they are intelligent." Id. at 55, 167. Also see Nell Irvin Painter, "Truth Be Told," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/16/2014.).
Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2014).
Stanley Crouch, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (New York: Harper, 2013).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("The global outlawing of chattel slavery has already become an important precedent for abolishing human trafficking and other forms of coerced labor--as we read the shocking estimates of the number of women and men held today in different kinds of bondage. But as for inevitable moral 'progress.' when we view the present state of the world with respect to human nature, there is less cause for optimism. Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate. Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural, and institutional, not the result of a genetic improvement in individual human nature. One needs only to note what happened in a highly 'civilized' country like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. If we imagine a worst-case scenario in which future climate change or nuclear war breaks up modern nations as we know them, antimoderernists and ultraconservatives might well restore chattel slavery on a large scale, especially in the Middle East. If my friends and I were suddenly stripped of our twentieth-century conditioning and plummeted to Mississippi in 1860, we would doubtless take for granted our rule over slaves. So an astonishing historical achievement really matters. The outlawing of chattel slavery in the New World, and then globally, represents a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget." Id. at 36-337.).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1999) ("History must have its heroes, and it is extremely difficult to believe that the causes we cheer were sometimes supported by scoundrels or feared by the men we most admire." Id. at 15-166.).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1966).
Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: Norton, 2014) (See Nell Irvin Painter, "Truth Be Told," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/16/2014.).
Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2014) (See Danzy Senna, "Face Value," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/23/2014.).
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014).
James McBride, The Good Lord Bird: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).
Darryl Pinckney, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (New York: New York Review Books, 2014).
Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life Of Nate Shaw (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1974) ("This big book is the autobiography of an illiterate man. It is the story of a black tenant farmer form east-central Alabama who grew up n the society of former slaves and slaveholders and reached maturity during the advent of segregation law. For years he labored 'under many rulins, just like the other Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man and displeasin to God and still I had to fall back.' One morning in December, 1932, Nate Shaw faced a crowd of deputy sheriffs sent to confiscate a neighbor's livestock. He knew they would be after his, next. Burdened by the indignities he has suffered in the past and awed by the prospect of overturning 'this southern way of life,' Shaw stood his ground." Id. at xiii. Also see Dwight Garner, "Lost in Literary History: A Tale of Courage in the South," NYT, The Arts, The Critic's Notebook, Saturday, 4/19/2014.)
