What greater gift to give yourself (or someone special) than a great book to dive into on a lazy winter evening? Here are some of the best books by fierce black women over the past year. This is one of the most comprehensive lists of books by your favorite sister scribes, mixed in with a few surprises that you might have missed.
Negroland: A Memoir
By Margo Jefferson
Jefferson is one the most insightful and gifted writers of her generation Negroland is the story of her coming of age is a very small region of Negro American (she is now in her 60s) where upper middle class black Americans created a comfortable, but somewhat uneasy place for themselves in pre-, and early post-civil rights America.
While her family had many for the blessings of privilege—her father was a pediatrician, she attended Chicago’s private, progressive Lab School, graduated from Brandeis and Columbia universities, and eventually worked at the New York Times, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. The story of her childhood includes the revelation that in “Negroland,” Black Americans may have enjoyed some degree of privilege, but it came with the constant awareness being perceived as too successful by whites could provoke their wrath. The book offers a wonderful, and perhaps rare, glimpse into the history of Black America’s upper middle class.
Publisher: Pantheon
Click to buy this book.
