What We’re Reading Now: Black Stories, Black Voices

Specially curated by our team, find your next favorite read at the Tenement Museum Shop! From Making Our Way Home by Blair Imani to Kia Corthron’s Moon and the Mars, check out what we’re reading now, highlighting books that center Black stories.

A Fool’s Errand
Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
Lonnie G. Bunch III

In its first four months of operation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture surpassed one million visits and quickly became a cherished, vital monument to the African American experience. And yet this accomplishment was never assured.

In A Fool’s Errand, founding director Lonnie Bunch tells his story of bringing his clear vision and leadership to realize this shared dream of many generations of Americans.

$29.95

All That She Carried
The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake
Tiya Miles

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.

Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

$22.00

Brooklynites
The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough
Prithi Kanakamedala

Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation’s third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life―businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers―who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn’s place in the history of social justice movements.

$30.00

Workers on Arrival
Black Labor in the Making of America
Joe William Trotter Jr.

From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today.  Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.”

In his engrossing new history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr. refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America.

$29.95

Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice: A Cocktail Recipe Book
Cocktails from Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
Toni Tipton-Martin

Discover the fascinating history of Black mixology and its enduring influence on American cocktail culture through 70 rediscovered, modernized, or celebrated recipes, by the James Beard Award–winning author of Jubilee.

Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice spotlights the creativity, hospitality, and excellence of Black drinking culture, with classic and modern recipes inspired by formulas found in two centuries’ worth of Black cookbooks.

$30.00

Black Ethnics
Race, Immigration, And The Pursuit Of The American Dream
Christina M. Greer

The steady immigration of black populations from Africa and the Caribbean over the past few decades has fundamentally changed the racial, ethnic, and political landscape in the United States. But how will these “new blacks” behave politically in America? In an age where racial and ethnic identities intersect, intertwine, and interact in increasingly complex ways, Black Ethnics offers a powerful and rigorous analysis of black politics and coalitions in the post-Civil Rights era.

$47.99

Making Our Way Home
The Great Migration and the Black American Dream
Blair Imani

Making Our Way Home explores issues like voting rights, domestic terrorism, discrimination, and segregation alongside the flourishing of arts and culture, activism, and civil rights. Imani shows how these influences shaped America’s workforce and wealth distribution by featuring the stories of notable people and events, relevant data, and family histories. The experiences of prominent figures such as James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, and others are woven into the larger historical and cultural narratives of the Great Migration to create a truly singular record of this powerful journey.

$18.99

The Sisterhood
How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
Courtney Thorsson

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group―which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others―would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.

The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group’s everyday collaboration and profound legacy.

$28.95

Homage
Recipes and Stories from an Amish Soul Food Kitchen
Chris Scott

From renowned chef Chris Scott comes a first-of-its-kind, richly narrative cookbook that celebrates an under-explored foodway in the African diaspora: Amish soul food. In Homage, Chris Scott tells the remarkable story of his family over seven generations via comforting dishes and vivid narratives: From his enslaved ancestors to his great-grandfather, who migrated to Pennsylvania after the Emancipation Proclamation, to his own childhood in Amish country, and, ultimately, his successful restaurant career in Philadelphia and New York City.

In this tribute to those who came before him, Chris Scott shares 100 dishes born of a unique blend of Southern, German, and Dutch cuisines, including Chicken Fried Steak with Sassafras Country Gravy, Charred Radicchio Salad with Roasted Grapes and Shaved Amish Cheddar, and the ultimate Whoopie Pies.

$35.00

Moon and the Mars
Kia Corthron

In Moon and the Mars, set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City during the Civil War, we experience neighborhood life through the eyes of a young girl named Theo. We follow her from childhood to adolescence, as a mixed-race orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandmothers.

Over the course of the novel, we encounter history from the Draft Riots that tear New York City asunder to the post-slavery period to Black people being a key part of the Union victory. Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P.T. Barnum’s sensationalist museum as white America’s attitudes towards race, people of color, and slavery are shifting—painfully, transformationally—as the nation divides and marches to war.

$24.95