Suggested Reading
The Quanders Since 1684: An Induring African American Legacy by Rohulamin Quander introduces stories that constitute the Quander family legacy as one of the oldest consistently documented African American families in the United States…an American history story written from an African American perspective.
North to Boston
Blake Gumprecht‘s fascinating writing exploring the little known biographies and oral histories of African Americans who took part in the Great Migration from the South and made their new home in Boston.
Black Loyalists: Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia’s First Free Black Communities Ruth Holmes Whitehead‘s scholarly examination of the origins of the British offer of freedom to the thousands of the enslaved during War of Independence.
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
Benji Cooper is one of the few black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan but every summer Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor,where a small community of African American professionals have built a wold of their own.
This carefully researched history details the military, political, economic, and cultural experience of black people during the era of the American Revolution. Beginning with Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the Revolutionary action, the authors recount a series of fascinating personal histories. The text is highlighted by excerpts form letters, journals, newspaper articles, and other documents, as well as by poems, broadsides, and passages from magazines of the day. Authors: Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan
The book is a revised and expanded edition of the authors’ classic catalog that accompanied a pioneering exhibition mounted in 1973 by the National Portrait Gallery.
The Other Brahmins
Adelaide Cromwell’s pioneering work examines race and the social caste system in Boston over a period of two centuries and those black individuals who exercised political, economic, and social leadership from the mid 1700’s to the middle of the twentieth century.
Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts 1742-1998 A fascinating, in depth examination by author, Franklin A. Dorman covering over 250 years of history of black families and individuals in the Massachusetts.
The Weeping Time.
Written by Anne C. Bailey, the story of the largest sale of human beings in American history. The author details a deep exploration how chattel slavery and the Civil War affected and many times destroyed both black and white families. A must read.