Several congregants participated in a rich conversation about Black history the last Sunday in February after worship. Each had chosen one or more books to read and to share with the group, which placed a great diversity of books and films before us and allowed us to learn not only from each other but about one another. Here is a partial list of the offerings brought to our table.
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander.
- The Fire Next Time and Go Tell It on the Mountain, both by James Baldwin.
- Kindred and The Parable of the Sower, both by Octavia Butler.
- Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, by Tara Bynum.
- Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. – American, by Benjamin O. Davis, Jr.
- The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- “Message Received,” by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Smithsonian Magazine, Mar. 2023, pp.40-51.
- Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley, by Michael Groth.
- 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Created byNikole Hannah-Jones et al.
- God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, by James Weldon Johnson.
- The March (Books 1, 2 and 3), by John L. Lewis and Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell.
- Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northrup.
- The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama.
- Jesus and the Disinherited, by Howard Thurman.
- American to the Backbone: The Life of James C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists, by Christopher L. Webber. (And a Presbyterian Pastor).
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson.
- Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates