Sacred Fire: How Many Have Warmed Your Soul?
Your Essential Books:
It has been 12 years since we first published Sacred Fire. A lot has happened in black publishing since. Erotica has been fully expressed; Urban Fiction has held strong to the market; and, still, great writing, regardless of its 'come from' has managed to break surface. We would ask for your help in updating our essential books. Please forward your list, or single title, to us at submissions@qbr.com. We will publish them in QBR and post them on our website. Please include your name and physical address, including zip code. Here they are listed, not in sequential order of importance but grouped in spirit, intention, and passion. May their spirit move and shape you, as they have me.
Max Rodriguez, Editor, Sacred Fire: The QBR 100 Essential Black Books
Origins, Ancestors, and Memory
1. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Yassa, the African,
Written by Himself by Olaudah Equiano
2. The Narrative of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by
Himself by Frederick Douglass
3. Clotel: or, the President's Daughter, A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States
by William Wells Brown
4. Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North
by Harriet K Wilson
5. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
6. Black Reconstruction in America by W. E. B. Du Bois
7. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans by John Hope Franklin
8. Stolen Legacy by George G. M. James
9. Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Jr.
10. Two Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah
11 They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima
12. Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
13. Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud
14. The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley
15. Beloved by Toni Morrison
16. Kindred by Octavia Butler
17. Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century
by Madeline Burnside and Rosemarie Robotham
Community and Identity
18. Lyrics of Lowly Life by Paul Laurence Dunbar
19. The Conjure Woman by Charles Chestnutt
20. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
21. Cane by Jean Toomer
22. The New Negro by Alain Locke
23. The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman
24. The Mis-education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
25. The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
26. Black Boy by Richard Wright
27. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton
28. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
29. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
30. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
31. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
32. Blues People: Negro Music in White America by LeRoi Jones
33. Jubilee by Margaret Walker
34. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
35. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse
36. We a BaddDDD People by Sonia Sanchez
37. The Hero and the Blues by Albert Murray
38. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
39. Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
40. Damballah by John Edgar Wideman
41. A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete by Arthur Ashe
42. Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
Politics, Nationalism, and Revolution
43. David Walker’s Appeal by David Walker
44. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans by Marcus Garvey
45. Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier
46. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
47. The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James
48. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
49 Africa Must Unite by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
50. The River Between by Ngugi Wa Thiongo
51. Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton
52. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
53. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson by George Jackson
54. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party by Bobby Seale
55. The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams
56. The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee
57. Notes of a Hanging Judge by Stanley Crouch
58. Race Matters by Cornel West
59. God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane
Soul and Spirit
60. Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
61. Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.
62. A Black Theology of Liberation by James H. Cone
63. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
64. Faith and the Good Thing by Charles Johnson
65. The Famished Road by Ben Okri
66. Tapping the Power Within by Iyanla Vanzant
67. Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans
by James Melvin Washington
68. Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditation on Loving and Working for Children
by Marian Wright Edelman
69. My Soul Is a Witness: African American Women’s Spirituality, edited by Gloria Wade-Gayles
70. The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Memoir of African American Faith
by Samuel DeWitt Proctor
Sisters' Stories
71. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
72. The Street by Ann Petry
73. Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks
74. Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks
75. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
76. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines
77. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange
78. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace
79. The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
80. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
81. Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall
82. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
83. Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan
84. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell
85. Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta
86. The Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby
87. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter
Brothers' Lives
88. Native Son by Richard Wright
89. If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes
90. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
91. Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
92. Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman
93. Fences by August Wilson
94. The Man Who Cried I Am by John Alfred Williams
95 The Life of Langston Hughes by Arnold Rampersad
96. Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe
97. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
98. W.E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race by David Levering Lewis
99. Black Betty by Walter Mosley
100. Brotherman, edited by Herb Boyd and Robert Allen
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