Black Excellence in the Media

NOTE: this piece is part of a series featuring black writers & artists for Black History Month.

Movies

  1. Black Panther

  2. Blackkklansman

  3. If Beale Street Could Talk

  4. Do the Right Thing

  5. The Color Purple

  6. 12 Years a Slave

  7. Selma

  8. Hidden Figures

  9. Get Out

  10. Malcolm X

  11. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

  12. Bessie

  13. 13th

  14. Moonlight

  15. Beasts of No Nation

  16. The Help

  17. Straight Outta Compton

  18. Girls Trip

  19. Love and Basketball

  20. What’s Love Got to Do With It?

 

Television

  1. Atlanta

  2. black-ish

  3. grown-ish

  4. Empire

  5. Insecure

  6. Scandal

  7. How to Get Away with Murder

  8. Orange is the New Black

  9. Marvel’s Luke Cage

  10. Dear White People

 

Fiction Writing

  1. “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker

  2. “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” Alice Walker

  3. “Beloved,” Toni Morrison

  4. “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison

  5. “The Hate U Give,” Angie Thomas

  6. “Sister Outsider,” Audre Lorde

  7. “Homegoing,” Yaa Gyasi

  8. “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Jesmyn Ward

  9. “Invisible Light,” Ralph Ellison

  10. “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston

  11. “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  12. “What We Lose,” Zinzi Clemmons

  13. “Things Fall Apart,” Achebe

  14. “The Underground Railroad,” Colson Whitehead

  15. “Brown Girl Dreaming,” Jacqueline Woodson

  16. “Citizen: An American Lyric,” Claudia Rankine

  17. “Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems,” Danez Smith

  18. “salt.” Nayyirah Waheed

  19. “Selected Poems of Langston Hughes,” Langston Hughes

  20. “Selected Poems,” Gwendolyn Brooks


Nonfiction Writing

  1. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou

  2. “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates

  3. “We Were Eight Years in Power,” Ta-Nehisi Coates

  4. “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin

  5. “I Am Not Your Negro,” James Baldwin

  6. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” as told to Alex Haley

  7. “Narrative of Sojourner Truth,” Sojourner Truth

  8. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr.

  9. “Becoming,” Michelle Obama

  10. “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama

  11. “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois

  12. “Women, Race, and Class,” Angela Y. Davis

  13. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander

  14. “Just Mercy,” Bryan Stevenson

  15. “The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson

  16. “Bad Feminist: Essays,” Roxane Gay

  17. “Ordinary Light: a Memoir,” Tracy K. Smith

  18. “We Should All Be Feminists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  19. “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” bell hooks

  20. “Help Me to Find My People,” Heather Andrea Williams

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