Ta-Nehisi Coates' list of 13 recommended books on race, slavery, segregation

I just saw this article about Ta-Nehisi Coates' list of recommended books (the link also brings you to an hour-long interview with him), and I'm putting it here to remind myself to start reading some of them, plus his own book, Between the World and Me.

1. “The Fire Next Time” in Collected Essays by James Baldwin. Many years ago I read as much of Baldwin's work as I could get my hands on, including this essay, and his fiction. I need to reread it.

2. The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, His Own by David Carr

3. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

4. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Era of the Civil War by James McPherson

5. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch

6. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America by Beryl Satter. I started reading this - it is about, among other things, the role that the author's father played in fighting against anti-black housing discrimination in Chicago. A quote from the New York Times review: "She persuasively and devastatingly argues (turning conventional wisdom on its head) that the true cause of black ghettoes in Chicago was financial exploitation — not the “culture of poverty” or white flight. She goes further, linking this kind of financial exploitation to today’s subprime mortgage crisis, an earlier example of greedy lenders pushing people “to take on more debt than they could handle” and charging inflated interest rates."

7. Confederate States of America – Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union from Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

8. Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court nomination That Changed America by Wil Haygood

9. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia by Edmund S. Morgan

10. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

11. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula Giddings

12. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching by Paula J. Giddings

13. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph