The Top 5 Black Biographies

By Defender News Service

We hope our coverage improves your mind or at least expands your reading choices. Here are The Defender Network’s choices for the best Black biographies, recommendations for books that are classics you may already know or those that we think are well worth your time. Feel free to share, print out, add to your Amazon lists, or download a few to your Kindle.

The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X 

By Malcolm X with Alex Haley

This is a classic that has literally changed lives. It’s tale of redemption resonates across generations and is a must-read or even re-read.

DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD  

Zora Neale Hurston

While many know Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, not as many know she wrote an autobiography about growing up in an all-Black town and her early years as a writer and folklorist.

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER 

Barack Obama

Barack Obama’s pre-presidential memoir talks about how he felt as a man whose African father was largely absent in his life. It’s filled with the kind of honest observations that would seem to suggest he never thought he’d be the nation’s 44th president. For that reason alone, it’s a good read.

THE FIRE NEXT TIME

James Baldwin

While not strictly a memoir, much of it recounts Baldwin’s upbringing in Harlem, and is a stinging rebuke of racism, which sadly has not lost any of its power given racism’s ongoing prevalence.

THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE

Kay Mills

The biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, a central if lesser known figure in the civil rights movement. An ordinary Mississippian, Hamer became politicized and as an advocate of voting and women’s rights, ultimately led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

This article originally appeared in The Defender News Network.