Black History Month Featured Nonfiction

Black History Month is a chance to engage more deeply with the stories, scholarship, and lived experiences that shape our understanding of the past and present. These nonfiction books highlight voices that illuminate overlooked histories, challenge assumptions, and celebrate the resilience and creativity of Black communities, offering meaningful insight and reflection.

Updated January 30, 2026
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Grand Prairie Memorial Library
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African founders : how enslaved people expanded American ideals
Fischer, David Hackett
Paper Book
In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States. ...
Black ball : Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the generation that saved the soul of the NBA
Runstedtler, Theresa
Paper Book
A vital narrative history of 1970s pro basketball, and the Black players who shaped the NBA Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into...
The Black church : this is our story, this is our song
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
Paper Book
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. "Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work." --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again "Engaging. . . . In Gates's telling, the Black church shines bright...
Built from the fire : the epic story of Tulsa's Greenwood district, America's Black Wall Street : one hundred years in the neighborhood that refused to be erased
Luckerson, Victor
Paper Book
A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa's Greenwood district, known as "Black Wall Street," that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification "Ambitious . . . absorbing . . . By the end of Luckerson's outstanding...
Half American : the epic story of African Americans fighting World War II at home and abroad
Delmont, Matthew F.
Paper Book
The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in...
The jazzmen : how Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie transformed America
Tye, Larry
Paper Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping group portrait of the pioneers and longtime kings of jazz--Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong, and Count Basie--who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to...
Last seen : the enduring search by formerly enslaved people to find their lost families
Giesberg, Judith Ann
Paper Book
"[A] meticulously excavated tribute to the formerly enslaved mothers, fathers, siblings, and kin who published 'last seen' advertisements in search of loved ones stolen from them in bondage...a vital work of recovery." --Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Master, Slave,...
The swans of Harlem : five Black ballerinas, fifty years of sisterhood, and their reclamation of a groundbreaking history
Valby, Karen
Paper Book
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK * Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography * The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood, a legacy erased from history--until now. "This is the kind...

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