RUSSELL RICKFORD

HISTORY

FAVORITE BOOKS TO TEACH:

I’ve Got the light of Freedom, by Charles Payne

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, by Cedric Johnson

Up South, by Matthew Countryman

MUST-READ BOOKS IN YOUR FIELD:

Race Rebels, by Robin Kelley

Race Against Empire, by Penny Von Eschen

Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, by Barbara Ransby

American Babylon, by Robert Self

Local People, by John Dittmer

Black Marxism, by Cedric Robinson

FAVORITE PLEASURE READS:

Cane, by Jean Toomer

Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown

CURRENTLY READING:

Defying Dixie, by Glenda Gilmore

Bloody Lownde, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries

My favorite books to teach compel us to think carefully and critically about the process of self-liberation, about structural racism, about the practice of freedom. They tend to deal with the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. They emphasize elements of black selfdetermination and institution building within that struggle. They emphasize the politics and ethics of democratic pedagogy within social movements, and they affirm the dignity of struggle.

My must-read books all help us to rethink the black freedom struggle in some fundamental way. They help to re-center and historicize black radicalism as a logical, effective force for progressive social change in the United States and beyond.