Black History Month

I Am Not Your Negro – by James Baldwin and Raoul Peck

In his final years, one of America’s greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project had never been published before acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined them to compose his Academy Award-nominated documentary.

Finding Me - Viola Davis

Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.

Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing, and Hope - Karamo Brown

An insightful, candid, and inspiring memoir from Karamo Brown—Queer Eye’s beloved culture expert—as he shares his story for the first time, exploring how the challenges in his own life have allowed him to forever transform the lives of those in need.

So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo

Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from police brutality and cultural appropriation to the model minority myth in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race, and about how racism infects every aspect of American life. E184.A1 O454 2019

Becoming – Michelle Obama

In her memoir, Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her time at the world’s most famous address. Warm, wise, and revelatory, this is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same. E909.O24O33 2018

The Book of Negroes – Lawrence Hill

A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex. Watch the miniseries on CBC Gem. PS8565.I444B66 2007

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism – Robin DiAngelo

Robin DiAngelo, an antiracist educator, illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviours, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue.

Joyfully just: Black wisdom and Buddhist insights for liberated living - Majied, Kamilah
BQ4570.J69M35 2024

Many of us have come to think about justice as a "struggle," a cause to fight for in the world. But what if the work of justice begins within? What if there were a way to find joy in the journey toward justice? With Joyfully Just, Dr. Kamilah Majied offers an inspiring and unique approach to overcoming injustice with joy, courage, and playful curiosity. She shares many of the insights and experiences that gave rise to her leadership as a joyful champion of contemplative approaches to mental health and social justice. Drawing on timeless wisdom from Buddhism and Black traditions, Majied invites us to play with different ways of being just toward ourselves and all life around us.

Black political thought from David Walker to the present - Pinder, Sherrow O., editor
E185.61 .B594 2020

These are the writings and discourses central to Black political thought and African American politics, compiling a unique anthology of speeches and articles from over 150 years of African American history. Providing in-depth examinations and critical analyses of topics such as slavery, reconstruction, race and racism, black nationalism and black feminism - from a range of perspectives - students are equipped with a comprehensive and informative account of how these issues have fundamentally shaped and continue to shape black political thinking.

Being somebody & Black besides: An untold memoir of midcentury Black life - Nesbitt, George B.
E185.97.N47 A3 2021

A keen observer and narrator of race, the author recounts with righteous and justified anger his bitter struggles and incredible triumphs, shared by Black men and women in America. His beautifully written memoir is a rare example of a sustained first-person narrative about Black life in the mid-20^th century. While many of his experiences will resonate with today's readers, others will provide a crucial glimpse into a chapter of Black life and its place in the unfinished struggle for racial justice.

The road to dawn: Josiah Henson and the story that sparked the Civil War - Brock, Jared
E444.H526B76 2018

Uncle Tom, the hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, is generally viewed as a humble, even obsequious character, symbolizing African-Americans' internalization of their oppression. But Josiah Henson, on whom Tom was based, liberated not only himself but many of his fellow slaves. Born on a Maryland plantation in the late 18th century, Henson becomes an overseer and a preacher, for many years accepting rather than resisting white dominance. But when faced with the prospect of being sold apart from his family, he orchestrates their escape. Reaching Canada with his wife and four children, Henson becomes a conductor on the Underground Railroad and establishes a free black community, Dawn, in rural Ontario. He narrates his autobiography to a Bostonian abolitionist, who brings Henson to Stowe's attention, and she draws heavily upon his experiences in composing her novel, which Abraham Lincoln later claims created the Civil War.

Black activist, Black scientist, Black icon: The autobiography of Dr. Howard D. McCurdy - McCurdy, Howard D. with Clarke, George Elliott
F1034.3.M42A3 2023

Dr. Howard McCurdy lived an extraordinary life. He was Canada’s first Black tenured professor; a founder of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; a founder of the National Black Coalition of Canada; the person who named the New Democratic Party; the second Black elected to Parliament. This book illuminates and celebrates the life of one of Canada’s most worthy figures. Says Clarke: “Dr. Howard McCurdy was exemplary in self-sacrifice; he was stellar in avant-garde thought and vision; he was…the most unforgettably proud Black man that I ever had the pleasure to know.”

Lawrencia's last parang: A memoir of loss and belonging as a Black woman in Canada - Jack-Davies, Anita
F1035.B53 J33 2023

This is a snapshot of the author’s life after the passing of her grandmother Lawrencia, the woman who raised her. Written in the style of a patchwork quilt that takes the reader back and forth between past and present, she examines her grief from the perspective of a Canadian-born Black woman of Caribbean descent, and she begins to question her identity and what it means to be a Black Canadian in new ways. This means exploring her childhood in Trinidad and her adult life in Kingston, Ontario, a predominantly white city; her experience of raising a mixed-raced child; and the meaning of her interracial marriage. Simultaneously a memoir, a eulogy, and an academic analysis, the book offers an insightful exploration of race in Canada, one that complicates these issues through the lens of identity and loss, but also through a prism of privilege.

Until we are free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada - Diverlus, Rodney, Hudson, Sandy, & Ware, Syrus Marcus, editors
F1035.B53 U58 2020

An anthology of writing addressing the most urgent issues facing the Black community in Canada. The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a white assailant inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, which quickly spread outside the borders of the United States. The movement's message found fertile ground in Canada, where Black activists speak of generations of injustice and continue the work of the Black liberators who have come before them. This book contains some of the very best African-Canadian writing on the hottest issues facing the Black community in Canada.

From my mother's back: A journey from Kenya to Canada - Wane, Njoki Nathani
F1035.K46 W35 2020

In this warm and honest memoir, celebrated academic Njoki Wane shares her journey from her parents' small coffee farm in Kenya, where she helped her mother in the fields as a child, to her current work as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Moving smoothly between time and place, Wane uses her past to illuminate her present.

"Where are you from?": Growing up African-Canadian in Vancouver - Creese, Gillian Laura
F1089.5.V22 C744 2020

Informed by feminist and critical race theories, and based on interviews with women and men who grew up in Vancouver, this book recounts the unique experience of growing up in a place where the second generation seldom sees other people who look like them, and yet are inundated with popular representations of Blackness from the United States.

This study explores how the second generation in Vancouver redefine their African identities to distinguish themselves from African-Americans, while continuing to experience considerable everyday racism that challenges belonging as Canadians. As a result, some members of the second generation reject, and others strongly assert, a Canadian identity.

The mantle of struggle: A biography of Black revolutionary Rosie Douglas - Andre, Irving W.
F2051 .A53 2023

Rosie Douglas, former prime minister of Dominica, had a life unlike any other modern politician. After leaving home to study agriculture in Canada, he became a member of the young Conservatives, under the Canadian prime minister’s guidance. However, after he moved to Montreal to study political science his politics started to shift. By the late sixties he was an active civil rights supporter and when Black students in Montreal began to protest racism in 1969, he helped lead the sit-in. He was identified as a protest ringleader after the peaceful protest turned into a police riot, and served 18 months in prison. After his deportation from Canada in 1976, having been named a danger to national security, Douglas participated in political movements around the world building global solidarity. He became a leader of the Libyan-based revolutionary group World Mathaba and supported Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Once back home in Dominica, he led the movement for Dominica’s full political independence from Great Britain, then served as a senator in the post-independence government, an MP, party leader, and finally prime minister.

Viola Desmond: Her life and times - Reynolds, Graham, & Robson, Wanda
F2346.26.D48R49 2018

For many Canadians, the first introduction to Viola Desmond will have been was seeing her portrait on the new $10 banknote. Those who are familiar with her life know that she was wrongfully arrested in 1946 for refusing to give up her seat in the racially segregated Roseland Theater in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Her singular act of courage was a catalyst in the struggle for racial equality, which ultimately resulted in the passage of human rights legislation that officially ended the practice of racial segregation in Nova Scotia. Today, Viola Desmond has become a national civil rights icon, and a symbol of courage in the face of injustice. She is considered by many as Canada's Rosa Parks.

There's something in the water: Environmental racism in Indigenous and Black communities - Waldron, Ingrid
HC120.E5W35 2018 – loaned to 4 Feb 2025

The author examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities. Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies.

They call me George: The untold story of Black train porters and the birth of modern Canada - Foster, Cecil
HD6528.R3F67 2019

Drawing on the stories and legends of several influential early Black Canadians, this book narrates the history of a very visible, but rarely considered, aspect of Black life in railway-age Canada. These porters, who fought against the idea of Canada as White Man's Country, open only to immigrants from Europe, fought for and won a Canada that would provide opportunities for all its citizens.

The banker ladies: Vanguards of solidarity economics and community-based banks - Hossien, Caroline Shenaz
HG2035.H67 2124 also available online

All over the world, Black and racialized women engage in the solidarity economy through what is known as mutual aid financing. Formally referred to as rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), these institutions are purposefully informal to support the women's livelihoods and social needs and act to reject tiered forms of neoliberal development. The Banker Ladies--a term coined by women in the Black diaspora--are individuals that voluntarily organize ROSCAs for self-sufficiency and are intentional in their politicized economic cooperation to counter business exclusion. The author reveals how Black women redefine the banking cooperative sector to be inclusive of informal institutions that are democratic and focused on group consensus, and which build an activist form of economic cooperation that is intent on making social profitability the norm.

Biographical dictionary of enslaved Black people in the Maritimes - Whitfield, Harvey Amani
HT1052.M37W458 2022 and online

This important book sheds light on more than 1,400 brief life histories of mostly enslaved Black people, with the goal of recovering their individual lives.

The author unearths the stories of men, women, and children who would not otherwise have found their way into written history. The individuals mentioned come from various points of origin, including Africa, the West Indies, the Carolinas, the Chesapeake, and the northern states, showcasing the remarkable range of the Black experience in the Atlantic world.

Reckoning with racism: Police, judges, and the RDS case - Backhouse, Constance
KE4395.B33 2022

In 1994, a white police officer arrested a Black teenager, placed him in a choke-hold, and charged him with assault and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen, Judge Corrine Sparks – Canada’s first Black female judge – remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with non-white youth. The acquittal was appealed and ultimately upheld, but most of the white judges who reviewed the decision critiqued Sparks’s comments. Reckoning with Racism considers the RDS case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada fumbled over its first complaint of judicial racial bias. This is an enthralling account of the country’s most momentous race case.

Out of the sun: On race and storytelling - Edugyan, Esi
NX650.R34 E38 2021

In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.

Black writers matter - French, Whitney, editor 
PS8235.B53B53 2019

An anthology of African-Canadian writing, Black Writing Matters offers a cross-section of established writers and newcomers to the literary world who tackle contemporary and pressing issues with beautiful, sometimes raw, prose.

The Book of Negroes - Hill, Lawrence
PS8565.I444 B66 2007

Abducted as a child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea, Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War, registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes” and eventually travelling back to Africa. A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex

The sleeping car porter - Mayr, Suzette
PS8576.A9 S54 2022

This novel brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George.

Finding Edward: a novel - Murray, Sheila
PS8626.U77825 F56 2022

Cyril Rowntree migrates to Toronto from Jamaica in 2012. Managing a precarious balance of work and university he begins to navigate his way through the implications of being racialized in his challenging new land. A chance encounter with a panhandler named Patricia leads Cyril to a suitcase full of photographs and letters dating back to the early 1920s. Cyril is drawn into the letters and their story of a white mother's struggle with the need to give up her mixed-race baby, Edward. Abandoned by his own white father as a small child, Cyril's keen intuition triggers a strong connection and he begins to look for the rest of Edward's story. As he searches, Cyril unearths fragments of Edward's itinerant life as he crisscrossed the country. Along the way, he discovers hidden pieces of Canada's Black history and gains the confidence to take on his new world.

Whiteout: How Canada cancels Blackness - Clarke, George Elliott
PS8101.B6 C53 2023

In his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke's range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, 'Africadian' community whose last home was razed in 1970. For Clarke, Canada's relentless celebration of itself as a site of 'multicultural humanitarianism' has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country's many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record.

The war you don’t hate: A novel - Ndala, Blaise
PS8627.D35S2613 2024

The paths of a Canadian documentary filmmaker and two former rebel soldiers from the Congo collide in this searing revenge tale about those who profit from the misery of others. Los Angeles, 2002. Véronique Quesnel accepts the Best Documentary Oscar for Sona: Rape and Terror in the Heart of Darkness, basking in the praise of her privileged audience. She has drawn attention to “the center of gravity that is Black tragedy”, which attracted her away from her life in Montreal, and to the harrowing story of Sona, a young woman who escaped sex slavery. But this lauded film has also shone a dangerous spotlight on Véronique herself. In the Great Lakes region of Africa, Master Corporal Red Ant and his cousin Baby Che are stalking the remnants of the Second Congo War – the deadliest conflict since World War II. In search of truth and vengeance, their obsession now has a name.

Post traumatic slave syndrome: America's legacy of enduring injury and healing - Leary, Joy DeGruy
RC451.5.B53 L43 2017

In the 16th century, the beginning of African enslavement in the Americas until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and emancipation in 1865, Africans were hunted like animals, captured, sold, tortured, and raped. They experienced the worst kind of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual abuse. Given such history, isn't it likely that many of the enslaved were severely traumatized? And did the trauma and the effects of such horrific abuse end with the abolition of slavery? Emancipation was followed by one hundred more years of institutionalized subjugation through the enactment of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, peonage, convict leasing, domestic terrorism and lynching. This book helps to lay the necessary foundation to ensure the well-being and sustained health of future generations and provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of society's belief, feelings, attitudes and behavior concerning race in America.

Online Books

Black lives are beautiful: 50 tools to heal from trauma and promote positive racial identity - Steele, Janeé M.
This is a workbook explicitly designed to help members of the Black community counter the impacts of racialized trauma while also cultivating self-esteem, building resilience, fostering community, and promoting Black empowerment.

The Journey Prize Stories 33: The best of Canada's new Black writers - Chariandy, David, Edugyan, Esi., & Lubrin, Canisia, editors
This much-anticipated, game-changing special edition of Canada's premier annual fiction anthology celebrates the country's best emerging Black writers. For over thirty years, The Journey Prize Stories has consistently introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. The 33rd edition proudly continues this tradition by celebrating the best emerging Black writers in the country.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential writings of a nineteenth-century black radical feminist - Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, & Dennie, Nneka D., editor

This volume collects writing by and about Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an abolitionist, suffragist, one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America, and the first Black woman to enroll in law school in the United States. It includes letters, newspaper articles, and several never-before-published documents that reveal Black women's centuries-long struggle for rights and freedom. Reading about Shadd Cary today shows how Black women during the 1800s fought for racial and gender justice and how they addressed topics that continue to inspire debate today, like racism, feminism, labor, and internationalism.

Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History - Johnson, Michele A., & Aladejebi, Funké
An exhaustive volume of leading scholarship in the field of Black Canadian history, this book highlights the diverse experiences of persons of African descent within the chronicles of Canada's past. The book considers histories and theoretical framings within the disciplines of history, sociology, law, and cultural and gender studies to chart the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in "multicultural" Canada and to situate Black Canadians as speakers and agents of their own lives. Working to interrupt the myth of benign whiteness that has been deeply implanted into the country's imagination, Unsettling the Great White North uncovers new narratives of Black life in Canada.