BOOKS

​This page features a representative compilation of books written about black people in the region that have been published over the course of the past several years.  For a more comprehensive list of books that cover the region, see our Black Midwest bibliography.

Black Toledo: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Toledo, Ohio
Abdul Alkalimat & Rubin Patterson

The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago
Abdul Alkalimat, Rebecca Zorach, and Romi Crawford

Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit
​Marlon M. Bailey

Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination
Herb Boyd

A People’s Atlas of Detroit
Linda Campbell, et al.

Diesel Heart
Melvin Carter Jr.

South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration​
Marcia Chatelain

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy
​Anna Clark

The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality
​Anna-Lisa Cox

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship ​
Aimee Meredith Cox

Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis
​Keona K. Ervin

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
Eve L. Ewing

Living Black: Social Life in an African American Neighborhood
Mark S. Fleisher

The Last Children of Mill Creek
Vivian Gibson

Double Exposure: Images of Black Minnesota in the 1940s
John Glanton

Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865-1912
​William D. Green

Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt
Jason Hackworth

Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization
Judith Hamera

American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination
Black Hawk Hancock

The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape
Javon Johnson & Kevin Coval

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Walter Johnson

Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
Scott Kurashige

Commando
​E'mon Lauren

When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri
David Todd Lawrence and Elaine J. Lawless

Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State
Christopher P. Lehman

​Leaving CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal
​Janice A. Lowe

Wild Hundreds
Nate Marshall

Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago
Brian McCammack

Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil: The Life, Legacy, and Love of My Son Michael Brown
Lezley McSpadden

Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980
Todd M. Michney

The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits
Tiya Miles

The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation
Natalie Y. Moore

​Six Days in Cincinnati: A Graphic Account of the Riots that Shook the Nation a Decade Before Black Lives Matter
Dan Méndez Moore

Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion
​Jamala Rogers

Idlewild: The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town
Ronald J. Stephens

Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland
David Stradling and Richard Stradling

Got to Be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound
​Andrea Swensson

GeNtry!fication or the Scene of the Crime
Chaun Webster

Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life
​Terrion L. Williamson