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Imani Perry's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Imani Perry recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Imani Perry's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Here is a magnificent account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African American artists, works which add a new depth to our understanding of black history.

Painter offers a history written for a new generation of African Americans, stretching from life in Africa before slavery to today's hip-hop culture. The book describes the staggering number of Africans--over ten million--forcibly transported to the New World,...
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Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerryThere’s a handful of books where you could say, if you want to know the story of black Americans, here you go. Her book is amongst the most meticulous. It’s hard to breathe life into narrative survey history; she does. (Source)

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2

Hands on the Freedom Plow

Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.
 
The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the...
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Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerrySo often the voices—and the work—of the folks who were not at the front of marches are left out of history books. While many wonderful civil rights histories have emerged in the past 30 years, I love Hands on the Freedom of the Plow because it conveys the voices of the women who volunteered to do the footwork for the movement, recalling how they got involved and their years of work in it. (Source)

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3
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In...
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Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerryIt’s an adept Marxian analysis of Alabama, and an economic and sociopolitical analysis of the region that is at the core of black life in the United States. Kelly drew from archives to deliver a strong sense of what black life was like in agricultural Alabama. It’s both a beautiful book and an instructive one. (Source)

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4
No other story in the Bible has fired the imaginations of African Americans quite like that of Exodus. Its tale of suffering and the journey to redemption offered hope and a sense of possibility to people facing seemingly insurmountable evil.

Exodus! shows how this biblical story inspired a pragmatic tradition of racial advocacy among African Americans in the early nineteenth century—a tradition based not on race but on a moral politics of respectability. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., begins by comparing the historical uses of Exodus by black and white Americans and the concepts of...
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Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerryGlaude is a groundbreaking scholar who writes beautifully. Exodus is an incredibly sophisticated, highly readable work. It’s a nice entry point to early nineteenth-century black life in the United States. It’s an intellectual history, a political history and a religious history, beautifully written and filled with engaging figures from this period. (Source)

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5

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time.
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Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerryW.E.B. Du Bois was the father of American sociology and one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. His classic text, The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903. Black Reconstruction in America came thirty years later. (Source)

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6

A Death in Harlem

A Death in Harlem is a mystery set in the midst of the 1920s Harlem elite with a perplexing death at its center and Harlem's first colored policeman poised to uncover the the relationship between the help, the privileged members of secret and no-so-secret Negro clubs, and the enigmatic white man whose relationship to (and interests in) the Harlem hold is key to the mystery. less
Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerryI’m currently reading this book. It’s so lush, elegantly composed, filled with great characters and intriguing. Get it! https://t.co/BdUK7Yikim (Source)

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7
Sullivan spent ten years unearthing the little-known early decades of the NAACP’s activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins—as well as a host of unknown but pivotal figures whom Lift Every Voice brings to light for the first time. With fascinating new information on the pre–World War I decades of the NAACP, the book culminates in 1963, altering the chronology of the civil... more
Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerryJust got emotional thinking about my great aunt Avie who died suddenly while canvassing for the @NAACP back when it was an illegal organization in Alabama. related book suggestion: Patricia Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and The Making of the Civil Rights Movement. (Source)

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8

Neuroplasticity

Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement--and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious "brain training" games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the general reader, describing how our brains change continuously in response to our actions and... more
Recommended by Imani Perry, and 1 others.

Imani PerrySuch a fascinating and elegant book https://t.co/88X4GNeYj4 (Source)

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9

The Changeling

One man’s thrilling journey through an enchanted world to find his wife, who has disappeared after seemingly committing an unforgiveable act of violence, from the award-winning author of the The Devil in Silver and Big Machine.

Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business called Improbabilia, he is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in...
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Recommended by Imani Perry, Matthew T. Hall, and 2 others.

Imani Perry@JoshundaSanders @victorlavalle I *love* that book! (Source)

Matthew T. Hall@theryanbradford Thanks for the recs, added to my list! Have you read anything else by Victor Lavalle? I saw he’s written a few other books. He’s a brilliant writer. Scary isn’t easy to write. But he did it! But in an eloquent beautiful way. That book left me in awe of the story and the writing. (Source)

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10

The Yellow House

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.

A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow...
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr.Just finished @sarahmbroom _The Yellow House_. That book is freaking amazing!!! (Source)

Imani PerryListen... if you have the chance go see @sarahmbroom while she’s on her book tour. And buy her memoir, The Yellow House. All the praise is real. It’s a gorgeous, moving, brilliant masterpiece. (Source)

Terry McmillanGreat evening meeting and listening to National Book Award Nominee: Sarah Broom read from THE YELLOW HOUSE! Powerful! Buy it and read it and you'll understand why she/it was nominated. Will take you home. #NBAwards (Source)

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Don't have time to read Imani Perry's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

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11
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying...
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr.You’re so generous. Get this book. It is brilliant! https://t.co/aKBHSi3kGM (Source)

Imani Perry@ruha9 It is such a brilliant book!! ❤️❤️❤️ (Source)

Kate Crawford@RDBinns Yep, lots of great resources on this. @ruha9’s book goes into contextual use really well, imho. For the past few years I’ve been describing it in terms of parity != justice. (Source)

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Don't have time to read Imani Perry's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.