Reddit mentions: The best african american history books

That's so cool! I'm glad you know so much already about your family. Some things I'd wonder about (and might answer through talking to relatives or reading books):

• The Creole experience -- there's lots of stuff about this, of course.
  
• The free black experience in St. Louis. Everything I know about this comes from a museum exhibit, but it seemed pretty interesting.
  
• Did your Creole relatives move from Louisiana to St. Louis? If so, when? What was going on (in both states) that might have prompted that?
  
• Was your maternal grandfather in the military before it desegregated, and if so what was that like? What was the end of Jim Crow like generally for your relatives? (I think either your parents or your grandparents would have gone through school desegregation?)
  
• Is either side of your family religious? If so, which denomination(s) do they belong to? What's it like being black in that denomination? If not, why not, and what's their black agnostic/atheist experience like?
  
• Your parents' experiences--you say they were raised around white people, but they both married black. Where did they meet, and how? Did/do they have any particular feelings about interracial dating/marriage? On your mom's side, what was her military brat experience like?
  
• Did you have any relatives who passed? (I do!) What were the circumstances? How does the family talk about them? Are there people who could have passed and chose not to?
  
  I don't know if you've read it, but I would suggest the book "Our Kind of People"--it's flawed in many ways, and my family was never an upper-class black family, but I found a lot of resonances to my own family in it, and from your description of your family, I think you may too. Another suggestion would be "The Warmth of Other Suns", and particularly the experiences of Robert Foster, a Creole doctor who moved from Louisiana to California in the 1950s. (I'm not sure if your family is readers, but see if you can get your parents to read it; I suspect they'd really enjoy it, and it would open some good conversations.) Finally, keep an eye out for "Black Elephants in the Room", which is being released in October and is about the particular experiences of black Republicans.

How? With what money? With what resources? With what education? You're talking about an entire population that was intentionally deprived of familial connections, cultural connections, the ability to organize, the ability to build wealth, the ability to exercise any autonomy, literacy, and education.

Africa is not exactly a small place, and most ex-slaves didn't even know where their ancestors had been kidnapped from.

Also keep in mind how much different things looked at the end of the Civil War than much later. Ex-slaves were promised equality with whites, full rights as citizens of the US, and given the promise of reparations for slavery. Congress passed a law in 1865 that guaranteed full citizenship regardless of race and the 14th amendment was circulated starting in 1866 and became part of the constitution in 1868. For a decade following the end of the Civil War Reconstruction proceeded at a fast pace. Laws were changed, progress was made, historical iniquities were being redressed. The vast majority of ex-slaves in this situation who were offered the possibility of staying wherever they were and using the labor skills they already had to attempt to make a living in America (either through sharecropping or on their own) seemed enormously enticing.

At a minimum the situation looked to be superior to their previous situation of enslavement. They were ostensibly free. They could keep their families together, they could build their lives up (in terms of wealth, community, education, skills, ambition, etc.), and they had the prospect of attaining true equality of stature and accomplishment with whites in perhaps a generation or so.

It was not until two or three decades later when Reconstruction had been destroyed and dismantled, when slavery had been replaced with a racial caste system that was becoming enshrined in custom and law (Jim Crow et al), and when it became abundantly clear that the end of slavery did not mean the end of white supremacy in America that black Americans began to comprehend that the society they lived in was going to limit the extent of their advancements to a very narrowly defined box not much expanded from where it had been before. And then there really was a huge debate on what to do. Black communities felt the oppression, understood the long-term implications and generally understood that the status quo was untenable.

Eventually they did take action and move, out of the South and into the North and the West in one of the most significant demographic shifts in the 20th century called The Great Migration. By then they had more money, more resources, more education, much greater literacy, and greater ability to move around (due to the advent of automobiles and the advancement of railroads). But even so, and even moving within the US alone, it was an enormously challenging endeavor that not all African-Americans undertook.

If you want to get some additional perspective on what things were like I'd suggest reading "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson.

Classism definitely exists, but like everything else doesn't exist in a bubble. Class, race, gender, sex, age...these things all intersect and interact in ways that make social realities for people. Academics (which I am not) have different opinions about the extent to which one is more important than another. I would say yes, historically it has been far more difficult for a person of color to move up in American society and yes, that is still the case today. But I'm just a guy on reddit who likes to read. If you're interested in this stuff here's where I started: The Color of Law, New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the autobiography of Malcolm X, The Warmth of Other Suns

> After the war, the Great Migration caused thousands to leave their homes for a better life in the North and in Canada.

One of the best books I've read on the Great Migration is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. A wonderful read, it's about three individuals who do just as you say, move to find a better life away from the oppression of Jim Crow.

edit: accidentally some words

In regards to your first question: very little. I mean, certainly they were involved in protest and civil rights movements however just because they were in Washington doesn't make their role anymore significant then black dissidents in the South.

The second question is a lot more interesting. While any micro analysis has its own variables, the sudden increase in black demographics within an urban setting is not particularly unusual for this time. The sudden shift in urban demographies has far more to do with suburbanization and the movement of manufactural basis out of the city and to the peripheries of the suburbs. Its actually quite a fascinating phenomenon that occurred in most major US cities at some point or another from the 1950-1970's.

Some reading on the subject if you are interested:

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles

Alabaster Cities: Urban U.S. Since 1950

American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

A little bonus one for your interests:

Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C.

Thank you! I know it's tough to balance pragmatism and idealism, but goddammit, I'm sick of endless discussions that amount to jack shit. The left used to believe it could win!

And like most good American left-wing rhetoric, I'm pretty sure that phrase originated or was at least popularized by the Black Panthers.

I'll attempt to tackle this question:

First, most historians would disagree with Chomsky in regards to the 20th century being the only time that African Americans had a chance of "entering" American society (despite the fact that they already inhabit American society, though we will give Chomsky a pass and assume he meant equitable access to meritocracy and large scale integration). For instance, many scholars, such as David Roediger, have written about the period of Reconstruction as one in which a multi-racial and inclusive society was possible, and the failure of this possibility is reflective of the prevailing influence of race, class, and the importance of the "wages of whiteness" in perpetuating racism and racial divide. If you are interested in this topic, I would recommend two of Roediger's influential works; The Wages of Whiteness and How Race Survived U.S History

In regards to Chomsky's statements on the Drug War, largely, I would agree. However, I would push them and state that the Drug War is part of a longer history dating back to Reconstruction in which the criminalization and institutionalization of African Americans was a means to control and subvert their population. Some historians have gone as far as to say that mass incarceration of African Americans has come to replace slave labor in the United States, as these prisoners (then and now) were forced to work for little to no wages for certain industries (picking cotton in the South for example). There are many scholarly articles and monographs on the subject, however, if you are interested in the post Civil Rights era I would recommend The New Jim Crowe as an a starting point.

In regards to the last fact, I suppose the claim is subjective to what one defines as "freedom". However, many historians have demonstrated that whatever "freedom" blacks have gained throughout their history, it has always been subjected and juxtaposed with the unequal access to particular rights, liberties, and resources available to whites. George Lipsitz has written that public policy and private prejudice has been intertwined throughout American history, leading to tangible benefits for whites in terms of education and employment and an "investment" in whiteness against Blackness. Moreover, Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction that whiteness provided particular "psychological and public wages" that promoted racial prejudice and racial stratification. It is through this paradigm in which Chomsky's statements must be viewed. Largely I agree with his statements, though I wish he would preface them with the scholarly and theoretical underpinnings in which I have attempted to provide you. If you are interested in the subject, I would highly recommend reading Lipsitz's work that I have linked and Roediger's How Race Survived U.S history as an entry point.

There was no slavery in the US in the early 20th century.

Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DK40HR4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

The post-reconstruction US wasn't too bad for black folks. America was rebuilt. Remade. African Americans had a huge hand in that. For the first time in history, they owned a piece of it. Built their own homes and started their own businesses. Folks who could probably still remember a time when they weren't allowed to learn how to read were able to build schools and educate their children. It was far from perfect. It was good though.

The Civil Rights Movement was a wonderful thing. I would have supported whole-heartedly, but I think the end result was detrimental to black folks. The government started social-engineering and moving people into huge housing projects in the inner-city. Essentially took a proud and self-sustaining people and made them dependent upon the government.

You can do your own digging and form your own opinions, of course. What is taught in schools and propagated by the media is rarely the whole story. Or the truth, for that matter.

Black people are concentrated in urban areas in the US as a direct consequence of discriminatory mortgage lending and realty practices in the mid 20th century that forced them into de-facto segregated neighborhoods.

Now, granted. Dems have taken advantage of that concentration to use these folks as a power base constituency. But those neighborhood circumstances were not created for political advantage. They were created to marginalize black people as much as possible during the period now known as the Great Migration when so many were fleeing the Jim Crow south.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679763880/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_vlJkDbTN6HPGS

hey, good luck.

The Public Schools

Jim Crow's Children

Ghetto Schooling

We Make the Road By Walking

Teacher in America

Women's Education in the United States, 1740-1840

Savage Inequalities

Shame of the Nation

also, i'll second Tyack's One Best System

a few authors to read/study: John Dewey, Horace Mann, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maria Montessori, Myles Horton, Dianne Ravitch, Jeannie Oakes, bell hooks, Howard Gardner, Betty Reardon, Howard Zinn, Cathy Davidson

topics: Native American boarding schools, ethnic/racial biases of original IQ test designs, desegregation, resegregation, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Bloom's taxonomy, multiple intelligences, tracking, career and technical education, the Common Core, school choice, special education, peace education, types of schools: traditional public, charter, contract, private, independent; the superintendency and school governance, elected/appointed boards, mayoral control, teacher cooperatives; resource inequalities, the incorporation of technology, teacher training, mind brain education, learning environments, standardized testing, accountability, teacher evaluation...

a list like you've requested could never be exhaustive, but that should be enough to keep you busy for awhile.

> hundred year old talking points

Official redlining didn't start until 1934. Other forms of discrimination and segregation existed during that same time period. For example, the realtors association of Grosse Pointe had an informal racial point system until the 1960s. This is hardly a hundred-year-old issue. Elderly people alive today spent a good portion of their lives living under these conditions. There are plenty of excellent, thoroughly-sourced books on the subject. Enjoy!

1 2 3 4

p.s. Wealth may not last for three generations, but that doesn't necessarily mean that poverty (and its effect) also does not last for three generations. It's much easier to lose wealth than it is to gain it in the first place.

>because the rapid demographic shifts from rural to urban areas would have threatened the Republicans' majority in the House.

Ahhh, the Great Migration. Anytime I hear mention of it I feel compelled to recommend The Warmth of Other Suns. It's a fantastic book that's well worth the read.

Be forewarned though; don't read this if you don't want to end up empathizing with black folk, because it'll getcha in the feels.

Couple of things, I'll just list it off and give sources.

The first, and most important, is that a human being is an efficient retainer for value and equity. If I own someone and train them, I can roughly guess how much money they will produce barring no accidents. They do not spoil like produce, deteriorate like metal, etc. Any civilization that does not possess a government backed currency or other method for retaining value and equity is going to have some elements of slavery present.

Source: Debt: The First 5000 Years

Second, and this ties into the first point, just because they don't call it slavery doesn't mean it isn't slavery. European serfdom was essentially slavery. It's not until after the bubonic plague that serfs began to assert their right to work for different landowners, ask for competitive wages, and begin to negotiate the terms of their labor.

Source: English Law in the Age of the Black Death

Finally, while slaves are certainly more productive than free labor, it's not technically free. You can either feed them, clothe them, and shelter them out of your pocket OR let them do this themselves. Giving them that freedom gives them bargaining power, which they will use to push for better hours. It wasn't really efficient to have large numbers of slaves in the northern portion of the United States because you only need them at certain times of the year. Cotton, which created a massive boom in the South in the 1850's, is a year round crop. If you aren't planting and picking, you're ginning it or turning the soil. Without some kind of crop or resource that is profitable when slaves are harvesting it, the practice is going to fade.

Source: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter

I'm traditionally more into literary fiction, but I've been exploring non-fiction recently.

Currently Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Recently Finished: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

Next on the List: Either Guns Germs and Steel or Devil in the White City. Haven't decided yet

I picked up a book about race at random from the new ones featured at the front of the library.

It begins

>So, we face the painful reality that we’re headed down this perilous path. The toxic rhetoric over the last year has surfaced attitudes that we thought were confined to our history. We’re experiencing a steady and dangerous marginalization of immigrants, people of color, and the poor. We’re witnessing an uptick in hate crimes and hate speech. We’re seeing government officials issue policies propelled by the twin forces of arrogance and ignorance. And we can’t simply stand still and hope things will go well. We must take action, individually and collectively, to change the entire discussion of a nation. So, we’re here to redirect a base, insensitive, and destructive national public conversation. We’re here to reorient a country that seems to have lost its way. To paraphrase Dr. King’s letter from Birmingham jail, we’re here because injustice is here. We have work to do.

>Many of the events of the last year have shaken us, but to a certain extent they were inevitable. We were not as vigilant as we should have been, and we became a little complacent over the last eight years. Recent events have reminded us that we need to regain our vigilance, and we must take on the challenge of justice at every turn. People in their twenties and early thirties have known eight years of an administration that embraced many of our values, and reflected our diversity, and advanced our ideals. So the tone and the conduct of this new administration are jarring. An important conversation is taking place for the heart and soul of America. And we must take the country to task where it must be taken to task.

This was 1 month into the Trump Presidency. This is how a conversation with top legal scholars began at NYU.

Take a look at Understanding and Teaching LGBT History.

I haven't used that particular one myself, but I know one of the series editors as well as authors published elsewhere in the series. I also make regular use of Teaching American Slavery - which goes hand in hand with the SPLC's Teaching Hard History frameworks.

I highly recommend reading Freedom Summer if you want to look more into the case as well as get an idea of the events leading up to the 3 civil rights workers' "disappearance" as well as everything following. Extremely well written, fascinating characters, and at times very brutal and hard to read. But it is a fantastic book.

That story is from page 208 in "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration." It's gobsmacking. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a physician and a veteran. If he couldn't get a room, imagine what it was like for an ordinary African-American. http://www.amazon.com/The-Warmth-Other-Suns-Migration/dp/0679763880

There's quite a few good books I'd recommend on the subject:

• A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960
  
• Racism in Kansas City: A Short History
  
• Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, Second Edition: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2010
  
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
  
• Take Up the Black Man's Burden: Kansas City's African American Communities, 1865-1939
  
  tagging /u/NotGerkonanaken since they said they were interested
  
  edit: obligatory 'thanks for the gold' edit. :)

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible which is about Russian society after almost two decades of Putin's rule.

The Warmth of Other Suns and Hillbilly Elegy because, in my opinion, they describe the past in way that informs the present social strife that Trump used to divide and conquer to win the Republican primary and general elections. If the Left is going to have a political answer in 2 and 4yrs for the people who either declined to vote altogether or who voted Trump, we have to understand and have compassion for their plight.

Hell's Angels because of Thompson's pinpointed description of the "politics of revenge". And also his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 has some parallels to the 2016 election.

It Can't Happen Here is in the same realm as 1984.

I'm in the middle of a few, including The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, about African-American migration from the rural South to urban areas of the US. A compelling and fascinating read.

Also reading a book about decorating your home (I know, right?) and of course continuing my rather informal Bengali lessons.

I second Billy Graham and I would add Jerry Falwell (founder of the Moral Majority) and James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) to the list, although I would say their importance is mostly limited to the US.

While many consider Martin Luther King, Jr. a civil rights activist, not a religious leader, religion was central to his message and his philosophies. He drew from the ideas of Gandhi and Niebuhr. To him & many of his followers, the movement was a religious movement. David L. Chappell's A Stone of Hope is a really good book about it.

Pleased to learn today that my friend Kevin Levin's book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, has gone into a second printing just seven weeks after its original release by the University of North Carolina Press.

"Artificial hair integrations, more commonly known as hair extensions or hair weaves, add length and/or fullness to human hair. Hair extensions are usually clipped, glued, or sewed on to other hair by incorporating additional human or synthetic hair. Natural human hair can be permed, dyed, and flat ironed whereas synthetic hair cannot. These methods include tape in extensions, clip in or clip on extensions, fusion method, weaving method, and wigs."
"The idea of hair weaves and extensions first came about in the early days of Ancient Egypt, where men and women utilized extensions in their hair to portray a more elegant appearance"
and really its not that hard to use google

You're incorrect. Try again please.

The challenge before us is very difficult, it is not easy to lift up a group of people that has been historically disenfranchised. But consider this, we had slavery for a longer period of time than we've had our independence. We have statistics, and we have the interpretation of statistics. Information helps us, but we need to look at the root causes of those statistics.

Why are more black Americans incarcerated? Why are more of them living in poverty? Is it biological? Or was it because of what we've done?

I highly suggest any material written Ta-Nehisi Coates to better understand and take in that broad view of how American and her citizens came to be.

> People are colorless and genderless as far as laws are concerned.

Statistically this is not true. Your color and gender have an astounding affect on the unique challenges you face. And we all face our own challenges, but that does not diminish the challenges others face. I highly suggest The Warmth of Other Suns and Crabgrass Frontier to better understand how policy and government has affected us.

Racism and bigotry is very, very alive today. We're not even seventy years out from the civil rights movement. 1960 was only 57 years ago. You can talk with people that lived with segregation, lived during periods of more lynching. We have to come to terms with this and address the harm we've done.

And yes it will be difficult, I don't have all the solutions to fix the problem, but being aware of our history helps us identify the wounds we need to treat. Listen to some James Baldwin, he says so much so well.

check out the 40 million dollar slave https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Million-Dollar-Slaves-Redemption/dp/0307353141, its not literal, but irs interesting to look at sports in a greater context of American capitalist systems.

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the migration Northeast and to the Midwest to escape the Jim Crow laws of the South.

And early on, NYC absolutely had slaves, freed slaves and indentured servants. Look up the NYC Slave Revolt of 1741.

Tony Horwitz's book was awesome as well. (https://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Rising-Brown-Sparked-Civil/dp/0312429266)

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but hopefully I can offer some insight into Jackson's comments.

A sports columnist for The New York Times by the name of William C. Rhoden wrote a book entitled Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. In his book, Rhoden draws parallels between how the owners and/or management of sports franchises dictate the fate of their players irrespective of their wishes to how a slave master values a slave as a piece of property in which the slave master owns.

A lot of people will preemptively dismiss anything Jesse Jackson has to say because of the baggage he carries, but in all fairness, Jackson didn't say anything about race or even accuse Dan Gilbert of racism. Spike Lee also made a (less brash, but) similar statement about Dan Gilbert not owning LeBron on ESPN.

If you're interested in reading Rhoden's reaction to all the LeBron James drama, you can read it on The New York Times website.

Don't kill the messenger.

I'd recommend these books to anyone in this conversation:

• 1861: Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart
  
  
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Neither the north nor the south did anything for some time. The Warmth of Other Suns is an AMAZING book about southern blacks moving north and west during the first half of the 20th century, and just generally depicts how terrible it was for them even decades after emancipation.

If someone in a Reddit thread with 16 comments came up with this - you think national media won't? To counter your "no, it's okay, I swear" explanation... someone already wrote a bestselling novel titled Forty Million Dollar Slaves.

It's not an erroneous criticism. It's 100% legitimate.

Oh yeah you'll definitely have that in Waukesha, you're literally in one of the destination counties of "white flight"ers from the 40's and 50's, after southern blacks started coming up here looking for work. (Called the "WOW" counties anectodally - Washington, Ozaukee, Waukesha). Typically white, growing older, vote R, listen to talk radio, commute all the way to Milwaukee to work - if they have to. They talk about how much of a pity it is how "downhill" and "urban" (read: black) Milwaukee has gotten, considering how "nice" (white) it was in the mid 20th century. Despite the fact that there are parts of the city that are thriving and modernizing, and attracting young people to live there.

​

Source: my boomer parents live in Washington Co, and my grandma has lived in Ozaukee Co since the 50's. They are the exact epitome of all of these things.

​

Edit: this book has been on my to-read list for a while, I believe it covers some of these very concepts. Or just look up the racial history of Milwaukee to understand why they probably feel uncomfortable in Waukesha.

Thanks! I just bought it. Here's an Amazon link if anyone else wants to, it's $8 on Kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DK40HR4/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?qid=1450453539&sr=1-8&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=The+burning

Almost done with Wesley Lowery's They Can't Kill Us All. It's about police shootings, the birth of BLM and modern journalism in general. If you're on a non-fiction kick, I think you'd probably appreciate it.

Good book

Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307353141/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_BqyQCb57SFKZ7

Not the OP, but The Warmth of Other Suns is a really good book about the era of mass black migration from the South to the North and West between WWI and the 1970s. Lots about Jim Crow in the South but also about the less-obvious racism in their new homes.

This may not be quite what you mean, in that instead of a bunch of smaller vignettes that are overlooked or miscast it's about one very large thing that isn't well understood because it hadn't before been looked at as one large phenomenon.

The Warmth of Other Suns

So we're going the birther route. Okay, where was he born? Where did he live in his early years?

Edit - I looked it up:

>Mckesson was born in Baltimore to parents who were both addicted to drugs at the time. He and his sister were raised by their father, Calvin, and great-grandmother in West Baltimore; their mother left when DeRay was just three (and has since gotten clean). Mckesson told “Interview” magazine, “…we grew up in a tough neighborhood. I remember sleeping on the floor when the gunshots got too close. And we moved so we could be in a different neighborhood and go to different schools.” After his father kicked his drug addiction, the family moved to Catonsville, Maryland, when Mckesson was in middle school.

Also in this book, it notes he was born and raised not far from where Freddie Gray grew up. I think we can rest the birther case. Deray is from West Baltimore.

Many have said this actually.

Link

Currently working on Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Links:

• Amazon
  
• Google Play

Forty Million Dollar Slaves?

https://www.amazon.com/Racism-Kansas-City-Short-History/dp/1943338027

So does this count as a counterpoint?

unless one of those 'numerous' professionals were Bell, it's irrelevant and people looking to get offended for the sake of being offended.

And it's not like there isn't actual reasoning for the comparison if you take the 10 seconds to actually think rather then just going, durr slaves didn't get paid end of conversation hurr.

Whew, okay. Pulled out my actual computer to answer this.
So, a lot of what I could recommend isn't short stuff you could read in an afternoon because 1. it's depressing as fuck, and 2. it's likely heavy with the sheer volume of references wherein at least one book attempts to bludgeon you with the facts that "this was depressing as fuck." Frequent breaks or alternating history-related books with fiction/poetry/other topics is rather recommended from my experience. Can't remember if I got onto this topic through Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or just some random book found in the library.

The very clean cut, textbook Wikipedia definition of "sundown town", aka "Don't let the sun set (down) on you here.", (Ref: BlackThen.com), is:
> sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.

For my intro into the subject however, read Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. This is a very emotionally draining, mentally exhausting book though, frequently with lists of atrocities in paragraph form. I think it's an important read, one which frankly should've been covered my senior year of highschool or so, but it's a difficult one. Also on my reading list is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration which is a surprising and sneakily hopeful title for such a depressing topic, so only guessing the narration may be somewhat more accessible.

Also, 'cause I totally didn't run to my kindle app to list out titles before fully reading your post, here's some below, and relisted one above, by timeline placement, best as can be figured. These might not be the best on each topic, but they're the ones available to my budget at the time and some are still on my reading list.

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

• Timeline 1831
  
  Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
  
• Timeline post-Civil War in 1865 through the 1920's, with thousands of towns still containing obvious racial divides (see "wrong side of the tracks", etc) and sometimes still utilizing laws to push black folks out of neighborhoods today.
  
  The Mis-Education of the Negro
  
• 1933, please see the book later down the list "Brainwashed"
  
  At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
  
• 1944 through the 1970's
  
  Assata
  
• 1960's through 1970's, about Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard)
  
  Revolutionary Suicide
  
• 1940's through late 1980's, about Huey P. Newton, Black Panther co-founder.
  
  Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
  
• 1980's through ?
  
  Sister Outsider
  
• 1980's essays on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class
  
  See also:
  
  Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival
  
  Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
  
• "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."
  
  Black Feminist Thought
  
• Supposedly there's a correct and incorrect version of this with severely cut or modified chapters, but not sure which is which.
  
  Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations by Bell Hooks
  
• Contemporary essays
  
  Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
  
• from slavery through today, how black people have been taught they're inferior to the point they help drag themselves and each other down
  
  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
  
• Supposed to be really good, haven't read this yet.