On Thursday, July 2, Duke Black Alumni (DBA) partnered with the Department of African & African American Studies (AAAS) and Duke’s world-class faculty to offer the first lecture of a virtual series on race and inequity in America. The Fire Next Time: A Conversation about Race and Justice in America featured Professor Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the AAAS Department, and Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith, Associate Professor of Duke's Department of History.

As a follow-up, here are the books and readings that Professor Lentz-Smith recommended:

• Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings
  • A biography of Ida B. Wells
• When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula J. Giddings
  • A classic of Black women’s history
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya V. Hartman
• We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination by Russell Rickford
• Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina by Christina Greene Ph.D.’96
  • Christina earned her Ph.D. in history for Duke and this book grew out of her dissertation
• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Tradition by Barbara Ransby
  • Speaks to Ella Baker’s vision of organizing, and thus her vision for the civil rights movement itself, which was a crucial legacy of the 1960s
• Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul by Tanisha Ford
  • Gives a history to the idea of beauty and self-care as political work in addition to exploring what activism looks like

Additional authors that Professor Lentz-Smith recommends include:

• James Baldwin
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Toni Morrison

See further readings here and here. 

On Thursday, July 9, Wealth and the Black Middle Class featured Professor Sandy Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. As a follow-up, Professor Darity's presentation, A Subaltern Middle Class: The Case of the Missing "Black Bourgeoisie" is available here.