Books like Hair story by Ayana D. Byrd

Margo Jefferson recounts her upbringing in Chicago’s black elite, tracing how the cultural and social dynamics of ‘Negroland’ shaped her life amid the civil rights movement, feminism, and the myth of postracial America.

A collection of African-American women's firsthand accounts of their experiences in the United States from colonial times to the present day, highlighting struggles, self-help, and resilience against racism, economic hardship, and violence.

Examines how white Southerners, faced with newly enfranchised African Americans after the Civil War, reinforced dominance through violence, segregation, and the construction of 'whiteness' that shaped 20th‑century American social hierarchies.

"Black is Beautiful!" The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties.Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated theintersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily lifev