I started tweeting this list, but umm…I have a book problem. It’s possible I’ve never met a history book I wouldn’t at least skim. And many that found their way home with me. I blame used bookstores like Powells, Afterwords, O’Gara & Wilson’s, & whatever stores I might wander into when I’m on vacation. And libraries. And reading apps. And…it’s me isn’t it? It’s me. This is an incomplete list because well…I really do have a lot of books in various formats. I was a book dragon in a former life.
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch
Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization Paperback by Arnold R. Hirsch
Romanticism, Revolution, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 by Caryn Cosse Bell
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
At the Dark End of The Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Chana Kai Lee
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis
Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 by George Reid Andrews
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture by Neil Foley
In my defense my focus in undergrad was Afro American history & it sparked an interest in other histories that has maybe led my wallet astray some times. Maybe. What books do you think I should be reading? What histories fascinate you?
hoodfeminism 
In terms of potential recommendations, allow me to throw the following into the ring:
– Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile
– Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins
– The Speech
– They Called us Brigands: The Saga of St. Lucia’s Freedom Fighters
– Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890-1945: Details Never Before Revealed
– How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
My favorite books discuss feminism, hair, and skin color:
– Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, Byrd & Tharps
– The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium, Russell-Cole, Wilson, & Hall
– Sister Citizen, Melissa Harris-Perry
I love your list as well!
If you like Hirsch and Bell, I strongly encourage you to check out some histories of the Haitian Revolution – CLR James’s The Black Jacobins is seminal, but I also love Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History and Joan Dayan’s Haiti, History and the Gods.