Read Until You Understand: A Guide to Black Literature and History

21 Essays on Black Literature as Liberation

One of the privileges of running this newsletter has been the chance to spend sustained time with black writers, thinkers, and the scholars who study them. Over the past several years, I’ve reviewed classic novels, memoirs, and histories; interviewed authors and academics; and traced a thread that connects Frederick Douglass’s stolen reading lessons to the Freedom School newspapers of Mississippi and to Octavia Butler’s time-traveling heroine.

That thread? Literacy as a form of liberation. For black Americans, reading and writing have never been merely an intellectual pursuit. Reading and writing have been acts of resistance, self-assertion, and survival. They have been protests and prayers, weapons and medicines.

For Black History Month, I wanted to gather everything I’ve written on these subjects in one place and offer a path through it. So, with that in mind, here’s a guided tour of twenty-one articles organized around a single conviction: that Black literature is essential American literature, and that its story—from the first forbidden letters traced by enslaved hands to the novels and memoirs on your shelf right now—forms a narrative we all need to know and appreciate.

Photo by Jadon Johnson on Unsplash

The Forbidden Word

The story begins when and where literacy was a crime. Before the Civil War, Southern states made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write. The prohibition tells you everything about the power of words: slaveholders understood that a literate slave was a dangerous slave—dangerous to the system that held them in bondage, dangerous to the lies that justified it. To pick up a book was an act of defiance; to write one was an act of liberation.

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are the towering figures of the genre we call the slave narrative, though I think that name is wrong. These aren’t slave narratives; they’re liberation tales. Douglass’s mistress taught him the rudiments of reading as a child before she was warned that literacy would ruin him as a slave. Too late. He mastered the skill by trading food for lessons from poor white children in his Baltimore neighborhood, and eventually landed on a copy of The Columbian Orator that changed his life—reading a dialogue in which a slave destroyed the arguments that kept him in bondage. Jacobs, hunted by a lecherous master for years, eventually escaped and used her pen to tell a story no one else could tell for her. Both accounts reveal not only the horrors of bondage but the resilience and daring of people determined to be free.

👉 “Liberation Narratives: Out from Slavery”

Before either Douglass or Jacobs published their narratives, however, an enslaved woman named Hannah Crafts did something astounding: she surreptitiously learned to read, devoured Dickens and other novels, and then wrote a fictionalized account of her own life and escape—the first novel by a black woman in America. She composed on paper stolen from her master, adapted tropes from Bleak House, and laced her narrative with gothic satire. She wrote herself out of slavery and followed her pen north, disguised in men’s clothing.

Her manuscript, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, hibernated for more than a century before Henry Louis Gates Jr. authenticated and published it. Furman University professor Gregg Hecimovich then spent twenty years painstakingly reconstructing Crafts’s life—visiting archives, interviewing descendant communities, and crosschecking documents until Hannah Bond Crafts Vincent emerged from oblivion.

👉 “She Wrote Her Way to Freedom” (review)

👉 “Rescuing One Woman’s Life from Oblivion” (interview with Gregg Hecimovich)

Crafts’s story is extraordinary, but she was far from alone. In African Founders, Pulitzer-winning historian David Hackett Fischer catalogues the sweeping ways enslaved and free Africans asserted their agency across every region of colonial and antebellum America—petitioning courts, forming independent churches, staging revolts, and acquiring literacy by any and every means available. One man traded apples for lessons. Two others learned piecemeal from itinerant plasterers working on their plantation. Newspaper notices for runaways inadvertently documented the results: slaveholders routinely noted which escapees could read and write, though they were often the last to know about the surreptitious skill acquisition.

Fischer’s central argument is that no humanity, however oppressed, fails to claim its autonomy. In doing so, enslaved Africans didn’t just expand the scope of their own freedom, they also expanded America’s understanding of what freedom means.

👉 “The Freedom You Make for Yourself”

Finding a Voice

If the first act of liberation was learning to read, the second was learning to speak—to tell your own story on your own terms. The great black autobiographies and memoirs of the twentieth century represent acts of self-assertion as much as self-disclosure. Each one says: I am here. I matter. And you will hear me.

Richard Wright discovered this possibility in a Memphis boarding house, reading Mencken by lamplight with books secured on a borrowed library card. “This man was fighting, fighting with words,” he realized. “He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.” Wright’s two-part memoir, Black Boy and American Hunger, traces his passage from a childhood of deprivation and violence in Mississippi to an intellectual awakening in Chicago. The hunger of the title is double: physical and spiritual. What Wright craved most was not food but connection—to be seen and known as his genuine self. Reading, and then writing, provided what he yearned for.

👉 “Hunger for Connection: Being Known by Finding Your Voice”

Zora Neale Hurston wanted, as she put it, “to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle.” Her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road follows her from Eatonville, Florida—one of the first cities in the nation founded and governed entirely by African Americans—through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Hurston fudged her birth date by a full decade so she could re-enter school after years of interrupted education following her mother’s death. She read everything she could find: fairy tales, Milton, medical manuals. The mighty struggle she longed for would come in the form of three novels, two folklore collections, and piles of essays, most produced during one extraordinary decade.

👉 “’To Stretch My Limbs in Some Mighty Struggle’”

Maya Angelou went mute for five years after a childhood trauma, convinced her voice was literally dangerous. A perceptive neighbor in Stamps, Arkansas, drew her back out using literature. “During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare,” Angelou recalled. She would need seven memoirs to tell her full life story; the first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, follows her from age three to sixteen—through abandonment, assault, silence, and a steely refusal to accept defeat. Tell Angelou she couldn’t do something, stand back, and watch what happened next. When the San Francisco railway company tried to brush off her application, her mother’s advice was characteristically blunt: “’Can’t do is like Don’t Care.’ Neither of them has a home.”

👉 “When Poets Speak of Life and Speak in Prose”

When asked about his alma mater, Malcolm X answered with one word: “Books.” Imprisoned before turning twenty-one, he began copying the dictionary page by page—a practice that echoed his mother’s habit of keeping a dictionary on the dining table while the children read aloud to her. He read fifteen hours a day, sometimes by stray light through his cell door. “I knew right there in prison,” he said, “that reading had changed forever the course of my life.” His homemade education gave him the rhetorical power to become one of the most formidable voices of the civil-rights era.

👉 “The Education of Malcolm X”

Esau McCaulley’s memoir How Far to the Promised Land attempts something different from the traditional autobiography. “A good narrative—a Black one, at least—is not owned by any individual,” he writes. “It is, instead, the story of a people.” So McCaulley’s book reaches back through generations—from a grandmother who once leveled a shotgun at her abusive husband and heard God tell her to let him go, to a father who drove off without his son and later stole his identity for credit-card fraud, to McCaulley’s own improbable path from injured high-school football star to New Testament scholar at Wheaton College. Faith and family—tangled, broken, but still resilient—form the spine of the story.

👉 “’A People Born of Trauma and Miracle’” (review)

👉 “’I Talk to God in Public’” (interview with Esau McCaulley)

Farah Jasmine Griffin was a little girl when her father handed her two books on his way to a court hearing, having jotted notes in the margins. “Read it until you understand,” he wrote. He died a few months later under terrible and avoidable circumstances. Griffin’s memoir traces how black literature stepped in to father her—Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison becoming the companions and teachers her father could no longer be. She crept into the hollow left by his absence and filled it with words. Today she holds a professorship at Columbia. The trajectory of her life was paved with books.

👉 “Robbed of a Father, Parented by Books”

And then there’s Sly Stone, whose memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a different kind of voice-finding—and losing. Raised in the Church of God in Christ, the future funk pioneer carried gospel source code into his music, even as he stepped away from the faith. His anthems of liberation (”Don’t you know that you are free?”) were secular gospel songs for anyone with ears to hear. But the memoir also tells a story of withdrawal—from the church, from the stratosphere of fame, from the people who loved him. The party couldn’t last. The question the book keeps circling: after higher, then what?

👉 “Take You Higher—and Then What?”

The Novel Approach

Ralph Ellison once called for “a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.” The black novelists gathered here answered that call. Their books don’t merely document injustice; they explore the full human range—love, jealousy, absurdity, faith, violence, joy—refracted through the particular experience of black life in America. Black literature at its best showcases, as Claude Atcho told me in our interview, “the universal dynamics of human life and contradiction through the particular flavors of its genre, culture, and authorial vantage point.”

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the declaration of independence at the center of this tradition. Janie Crawford endures two suffocating marriages before finding love—and herself—with the itinerant Tea Cake. Hurston wrote the novel in a seven-week sprint while researching voodoo in Haiti, trying to escape a complicated romance. What she produced was a story about a woman’s right to desire, to choose, to be—joyously and fiercely independent. I sold dozens of copies when I worked at a used bookstore in my late teens; the high schoolers found it on their reading lists. Thanks to lists like that, the book has sold over a million copies.

👉 “A Woman on Her Own, Joyously and Fiercely Independent”

Nella Larsen’s two slender novels cut like stilettos. In Quicksand, Helga Crane drifts between white and Black worlds, belonging to neither, finding no place that will hold her. In Passing, Clare Bellew passes as a white woman married to a violent racist who has no idea who she really is. Both novels are about the prisons that America’s obsession with color constructs for everyone, including those who think they’ve escaped. I think Passing compares favorably with The Great Gatsby—both novels concerned with self-manufacture, both narrated from a close personal perspective that conceals as much as it reveals, both ending in exposure and catastrophe. Anyone drawn to one should consider the other.

👉 “Coloring Outside the Lines”

George S. Schuyler’s 1931 Black No More asks an impish question: What would happen if black Americans could turn white overnight? A scientist invents the procedure; a lovelorn man named Max undergoes it to win a woman who rejected him for his color; and then everything—black institutions, white supremacist organizations, presidential politics—spirals into glorious chaos. Nearly a hundred years later, the satire still bites. I laughed all the way through, even at the sinister moments—as when, for instance, two white supremacists try hiding out in blackface, fall into the hands of a lynch mob, and quickly regret their diguise.

👉 “Change Your Skin, Change Your Life?”

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been winning prizes and getting banned since the 1980s. Complaints target the dialect, the explicit content, the depictions of abuse, the same-sex relationship, the unorthodox theology. What the banners miss is the book’s ferocious insistence on redemption. Celie’s journey from silence to having voice—from writing letters to a God she’s not sure is listening to building a life on her own terms—mirrors the larger arc of the tradition this entire post is about. Oprah Winfrey read it in a single sitting and said it changed her life. It’s a book to offend almost everyone and maybe even heal those who need it.

👉 “Purple Rage? A Book to Offend Almost Everyone”

Gwendolyn Brooks is best known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but her 1953 novel Maud Martha deserves wider recognition. In just over a hundred pages, Brooks compresses decades of a black woman’s life in Chicago into a series of luminous vignettes—small moments rendered with a poet’s exactness. It’s a quiet, domestic book about the beauty and frustration of ordinary life, and it rewards any reader who slows down enough to listen.

👉 “When Poets Speak of Life and Speak in Prose”

Chester Himes began writing in prison, where, as he put it, the exercise “protected me against the convicts and the screws.” After years of critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing realist fiction, a French editor offered him a fat advance to try crime novels. The result was A Rage in Harlem, a noir classic so zany, so propulsive, so crammed with “escalating calamities” and “demented slapstick violence” (per critic Jake Kerridge) you won’t know what to do . . . except keep turning pages. It features a lovelorn fool named Jackson, his twin brother who cross-dresses as a nun and sells tickets to heaven, and a pair of skull-crushing black police officers named Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Beneath the farce? A portrait of a community where everyone’s got an angle because the straight path was never really open.

👉 “No Easy Money, But What If?”

World War II–era poster produced for the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library by the Works Progress Administration. The message? Information and culture are forms of power. Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Octavia Butler looked at science fiction, saw no one who looked like her, and, as she said, wrote herself in. Kindred sends a modern Black woman named Dana back in time to an antebellum Maryland plantation, where she must repeatedly save the life of a white ancestor—a slaveholder whose existence ensures her own. The novel refuses easy moral judgments from the safety of the present. Butler conceived the idea in college after hearing young radicals dismiss their ancestors for insufficient resistance to the abuses of slavery. She wanted them to understand what it felt like when “the whole society is literally arrayed against you.” Dana returns to the present missing part of her arm. The past leaves scars, Butler insists, and we carry them whether we acknowledge them or not.

👉 “Scars of the Past: Octavia Butler’s Kindred”

The Larger Tradition

The individual books and authors above are remarkable on their own. But they also belong to a larger tradition—a centuries-long intellectual and literary project—that scholars have been working to recover, document, and interpret. Several of the pieces I’ve written step back to take in this wider view.

A few years back I published an essay tracing the connection between literacy, literary form, and liberation across black American history. It begins with the Freedom Schools of Mississippi in 1964, where children as young as eleven published newspapers that were sometimes the only coverage of the civil-rights movement in their communities. It follows the thread back through the slave narratives, the black intellectual tradition, and—most surprisingly—the sonnet, that most European of poetic forms, which black poets adopted and adapted into, as Hollis Robbins shows, little protest songs.

👉 “Ideas Are Tools, and Words Can Heal”

In my conversation with Claude Atcho—Anglican priest, former English professor, and author of Reading Black Books—we explored what black literature means for all Americans. “Black literature has given American culture and identity a chance to heal and develop our nation’s soul,” he told me. Atcho is drawn to themes of recognition and dignity: “To be seen and recognized by others is part of what we were made for.” His point is that black literature doesn’t just speak to Black readers. It speaks to anyone interested in what it means to be human in a world that sometimes denies your humanity.

👉 “’A Chance to Heal and Develop Our Nation’s Soul’”

Last year I wrote a review of four major biographies to compare the lives of an unlikely quartet of American innovators: Buckminster Fuller, Martin Luther King Jr., Milton Friedman, and Sonny Rollins. I found striking parallels in how they developed their visions, weathered opposition, and built the habits of mastery. King and Rollins shine as exemplars of the innovative spirit that runs through black American history. King’s rhetorical genius drew on interweaving trails through the black church and the Western literary canon, while Rollins distilled bebop, calypso, and the American songbook into something entirely his own. Both embodied the self-determination and creative freedom that define this tradition at its best.

👉 “3 Ways to Make New Stuff Happen”

Read Until You Understand

All of which brings me back to a little girl and a father’s note scrawled in the margin of a book. “Read it until you understand,” Emerson Griffin wrote his daughter Farah Jasmine Griffin. He couldn’t have known it would be among his last messages to her. He couldn’t have known she would spend her life honoring the instruction—that she would become a professor of African American literature at Columbia, that his two books would multiply into hundreds and hundreds she would read, that the imperative he scratched in pencil would become a lifelong vocation.

But maybe he sensed it. Maybe he understood—as Douglass and Crafts and Wright and Hurston and Angelou and Malcolm X and Butler and all the rest understood—that reading is not passive. It opens doors that can never again be shut, and all those books beckon us through passages and into other ways of seeing and being in the world, ones freer than what we left behind.

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