Supporting Black Communities

Anti-Black racism is pervasive and combating it is critical to addressing the ways white supremacy has informed our institutions, our policies, and our daily interactions with each other. You may be seeking ways to actively support Black friends, neighbors, and colleagues, or you may identify as Black and seek educational resources, support, or wish to report a bias incident. Each of us can play a part in supporting Black communities.

The resources below were compiled in partnership with students, faculty, and staff from across the University. Requests to add additional items can be sent to [email protected].

The resources below include off-campus resources that Columbia is neither affiliated with nor explicitly endorses. This list is intended only to inform our community of available resources.

BOOKS

The books listed below are only a small sample of books available from Columbia Libraries on this topic. Please consult with a Columbia reference librarian for additional resources.

Book descriptions are visible when hovering over book covers.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
In Dark Matters, Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing Black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices and lantern laws. (Image courtesy of Duke University Press.)
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

by Simone Browne

Thick: And Other Essays
In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom — award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed — embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society. (Image courtesy of The New Press.)
Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Women, Race and Class
A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis. (Image courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
Women, Race and Class

by Angela Davis

When Affirmative Action Was White
In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review), Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of 20th century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. (Image courtesy of WW Norton.)
When Affirmative Action Was White

by Ira Katznelson

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speech
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. (Image courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speech

by Audre Lorde

At the Dark End of the Street
Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. (Image courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
At the Dark End of the Street

by Danielle McGuire

Spectacle
An award-winning journalist reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit — a shocking story of racial prejudice, science and tragedy in the early years of the 20th century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid. (Image courtesy of Harper Collins Publishers.)
Spectacle

by Pamela Newkirk

How We Get Free
The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles. (Image courtesy of Haymarket Books.)
How We Get Free

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

The End of Policing
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. (Image courtesy of Verso Books.)
The End of Policing

by Alex Vitale

The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader
The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women’s rights pioneer. Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks’s courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells’s career, and — when hate crimes touched her life personally — she mounted what was to become her life’s work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured international attention. (Image courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader

by Ida B. Wells

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect
This collection of reports and essays (the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books) explores police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police. (Image courtesy of Haymarket Books.)
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect

by Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar and Alana Yu-lan Price (free download)

SNCC: The New Abolitionists
Howard Zinn tells the story of one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement. SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the tremendously influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It is considered an indispensable study of the organization, of the 1960s, and of the process of social change. Includes a new introduction by the author. (Image courtesy of Haymarket Books.)
SNCC: The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

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