100 Essential Readings of the Foundational Black American Experience

Establish the presence and experiences of Black people in colonial and early America — before the United States existed. Includes primary sources on the first Africans in colonial America, free Black communities, and the FBA claim to American identity from the beginning.

Let historical Black Americans speak through their own testimony. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, and the 2,300 voices of the WPA Slave Narratives — the most important primary sources in American history.

The Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau records, and the histories of the most democratic — and most deliberately destroyed — period in American history.

Ida B. Wells's investigative journalism, the legal architecture of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Great Migration, and the scholarship documenting how Reconstruction's gains were systematically destroyed through violence and law.

Black Wall Street, Tuskegee Institute, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Council of Negro Women — the FBA tradition of building institutions, accumulating wealth, and creating the infrastructure of community life.

Lewis Latimer's carbon filament, Granville Woods's railway telegraph, Patricia Bath's Laserphaco Probe, the Hidden Figures mathematicians — FBA inventors and scientists whose contributions built American industry and were systematically denied credit.

Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer's DNC testimony, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act — the movement's literature, strategy, and legislation in the words of those who made it.

Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou — the literary and cultural record of FBA life as a constituent and defining part of American civilization.

The Homestead Act, the GI Bill, FHA redlining, the Kerner Report, The Color of Law, The New Jim Crow — the policy record documenting how government action created and maintained the racial wealth gap.

H.R. 40, the California Reparations Task Force Report, Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations, lineage documentation — the primary documents and scholarship of the contemporary reparations debate, presented with competing arguments rather than a single conclusion.