The Root Presents: Its Lit! Archives

Just Us: An American Conversation

In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? “I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room,” she writes. […Learn More]

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

Explores the Black activist’s ideas and political strategies, highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality.

“We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free.”
—Fannie Lou Hamer […Learn More]

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action, “a must-read in the effort to dismantle deep-seated poisons of systemic racism and white supremacy” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves. […Learn More]

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev

An electrifying novel about the meteoric rise of an iconic interracial rock duo in the 1970s, their sensational breakup, and the dark secrets unearthed when they try to reunite decades later for one last tour. […Learn More]

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

Explores the Black activist’s ideas and political strategies, highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality.
A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice.
[…Learn More]

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. […Learn More]

All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. […Learn More]

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

From breakout writer and peerless new voice Hanif Abdurraqib, the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, comes a personal and introspective examination of black performance in America, in which race, history, culture, and entertainment collide.

They Don’t Dance No Mo’ is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of black performance, in this moment when black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. […Learn More]

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“The Atlantic writer drafts a history of slavery in this country unlike anything you’ve read before” (Entertainment Weekly).

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. […Learn More]

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing—a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with”—comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America. […Learn More]