Announcing...
The 2025 Short List
Michelle Adams | Ana Lucia Araujo | Benjamin Barson | Jokeda “Jojo” Bell | Bridget M. Davis | Natanya Duncan | David Greenberg | Rasheedah Phillips | Jeane Theoharis | Joe William Trotter, Jr. | Carvell Wallace | Gloria McCahon Whiting
The following twelve books were chosen from 141 eligible submissions. Books are judged based on their scholarship and accessibility, with an eye toward identifying exceptional works that spark dialogue within and across social and racial groups. These books also represent the Museum’s core belief that understanding the history of African Americans is integral to understanding our collective American history.
The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
Michelle Adams
In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?
In The Containment, legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery
Ana Lucia Araujo
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore.
Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.
Published by University of Chicago Press
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons
Benjamin Barson
Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed.
Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes.
Published by Wesleyan University Press
Red Stained: The Life of Hilda Simms
Jokeda “Jojo” Bell
Hilda Simms emerged as an actress at a time when segregation was deeply entrenched in Hollywood and on Broadway. Black performers were mostly relegated to bit parts, stereotyped characters, or comic-relief roles—if they were hired at all.
Red Stained: The Life of Hilda Simms, the first full biography of her life and career, weaves primary research with a narrative style to tell the true story of Hilda Simms in the context of a nation gripped in the Cold War and a burgeoning civil rights movement. It is an examination of Simms's rise to fame, her drive to be a respected dramatic actress, and her efforts to create equal opportunities for people of color on stage, on the screen, and behind the camera.
Published by Minnesota Historical Society Press
Love, Rita
Bridgett M. Davis
In Love, Rita Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister Rita, who knew Bridgett before she knew herself.
Rita’s life was cut short by lupus when she was forty-four. This led Bridgett to ask the simple, heartbreaking question: Why Rita?
Published by HarperCollins
An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Improvement Association
Natanya Duncan
From its Kingston, Jamaica, inception in 1914, women helped define and shape the Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist aims of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Their efforts, made possible in part by UNIA cofounder Amy Ashwood Garvey, helped sustain the largest social justice organization of the twentieth century.
Published by University of North Carolina Press
John Lewis: A Life
David Greenberg
Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions.
Greenberg’s work captures John Lewis’s influential career through documents from numerous archives, interviews with 275 people who knew him, and rare footage of Lewis speaking from his hospital bed after Selma.
Published by Simon & Schuster
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.
Published by AK Press
King of the North: MLK's Life of Struggle Outside of the South
Jeanne Theoharis
The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice.
Published by The New Press
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Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life
Joe William Trotter, Jr.
Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Covering an incredible range of cities from the North to the South, the East to the West, Joe William Trotter, Jr., traces the growth of Black cities and political power from the preindustrial era to the present.
Published by University of California Press
Another Word for Love
Carvell Wallace
Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America.
Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England
Gloria McCahon Whiting
New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent.
In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin.
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
Design for the 2024 Shortlist page was inspired by the New York Times
100 Best Books of the 21st Century