Celebrating Black History Month: A selective list of Black history books

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) chooses the themes annually for Black History Month. The 2025 theme for Black History Month is African Americans and Labor and “focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.” 

The San Diego State University Library has compiled a list of books about African Americans in all subject areas in our collection. We invite you to check them in by visiting the University Library for a print version or accessing an eBook version online.

We also invite you to visit the Africana Studies Collection on the third floor of the University Library's Love Library.

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The Africana Studies Collection (ASC) is a browsing collection for young adults and above, aligning with the curriculum areas of the university. 

This collection covers topics related to African American communities and Black communities. Materials in this collection support a curriculum built around the topic of Black and African American Studies and studies of the African Diaspora. This collection also includes broad collections supporting research and teaching on Black Studies, African American Studies, and the African Diaspora across the curriculum at SDSU. African American Studies Librarian will build the collection, taking recommendations from the library's partners, librarian selectors, and others engaged in culturally relevant research.

Bone black : memories of girlhood
By: Hooks, Bell. (1996). New York : Henry Holt and Co. 

Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up in the South. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child's journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the emotional vulnerability of children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman's color--worn when earned--daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. hooks finds good company in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath. 

• Available: In Print 
• Find at: SDSU Library 3rd Floor Books 
• Call Number: E185.97.H77 A3 1996 

Sister outsider : essays and speeches
By: Lorde, Audre. (2007). Berkeley : Crossing Press.

"Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, SISTER OUTSIDER celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to 'never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is. . . .'" --Provided by publisher. 

• Available: Online 

River sing me home
By: Shearer, Eleanor. (2023). New York : Berkley. 

"Rare. Moving. Powerful. This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery marks the arrival of a remarkable new talent. Her search begins with an ending.... The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs. Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children-the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. The grueling, dangerous journey takes her from Barbados then, by river, deep into the forest of British Guiana and finally across the sea to Trinidad. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear. These are the stories of Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. But above all this is the story of Rachel and the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to find her children...and her freedom."-- Provided by publisher. 

• Available: In Print 
• Find at: SDSU Library Africana Studies Collection 
• Call Number: PR6119.H433 R58 2023 

On the come up 
By: Thomas, Angie. (2019). New York, NY : Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least win her first battle. As the daughter of an underground hip-hop legend who died San Diego State University Library 2 right before he hit big. Bri's got massive shoes to fill. But it's hard to get your come up when you're labeled a hoodlum at school and your fridge at home is empty after you mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral ... for all the wrong reasons. Bri soon finds herself at the center of a controversy, portrayed by the media as more menace than MC. But with an eviction notice staring her family down, Bri doesn't just want to make it - she has to. Even if it means becoming the very thing the public has made her out to be. Insightful, unflinching, and full of heart, On the Come Up is an ode to hip-hop from one of the most influential literary voices of a generation. It is the story of fighting for your dreams, even as the odds are stacked against you, and about how, especially for young black people, freedom of speech isn't always free. -- From dust jacket. 

• Available: In Print 
• Find at: SDSU Library Juvenile Collection 
• Call Number: 813 T454O58 2019 

Black buck
By: Askaripour, Mateo. (2021). Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

"For fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street - a blazing, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cultlike, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems. An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor. After enduring a "hell week" of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as "Buck," a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he's hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America's sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game. Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America's workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream." -- From dust jacket. 

• Available: In Print 
• Find at: SDSU Library 4th Floor Books 
• Call Number: PS3601.S593 B57 2021