Books like Mules and Men (P.S.) by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston’s Pulitzer‑winning novel follows Janie Crawford’s journey of self‑discovery and empowerment, mapping her search for love, independence, and identity against the backdrop of the African‑American South during the early 20th century.

James Baldwin’s classic follows a fourteen‑year‑old boy in 1935 Harlem as he wrestles with identity, faith, family, and sexuality, revealing the complex intersections of race, religion, and personal growth in America’s urban landscape.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a non‑fiction study of the Great Migration, tracing the journey of nearly six million African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970.

Booker T. Washington tells his own story, from birth into slavery to becoming a powerful educator and founder of the Tuskegee Industrial Institute.

A collection of 34 folk tales from an old Georgian slave, featuring Brer B’ar, Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit.|

Equal parts cultural history and memoir, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man recounts a traditional way of life that is threatened by change, with stories that speak to our deepest notions of family, community, and a connection to one's homeland. Cornelia Walker Bailey models herself after the African griot, the tribal storytellers who keep the history of their people. Bailey's people are the Geechee, whose cultural identity has been largely preserved due to the relative isolation of Sapelo, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. In this rich account, Bailey captures the experience of growing up in an island community that counted the spirits of its departed among its members, relied on pride and ingenuity in the face of hardship, and taught her firsthand how best to reap the bounty of the marshes, woods and ocean that surrounded her. The power of this memoir to evoke the life of Sapelo Island is remarkable, and the history it preserves is invaluable.

To protect their identity and values, Africans enslaved in America transformed various familiar character types to create folk heroes who offered models of behavior both recognizable to them as African people and adaptable to their situation in America. Roberts specifically examines the Afro-American trickster and the trickster tale tradition, the conjurer as folk hero, the biblical heroic tradition, and the badman as outlaw hero. -- Publisher description from http://www.upenn.edu (Oct. 11, 2011).

Indexed in Sears Song Index.

A collection of African American folktales, songs, and sayings collected by Joel Chandler Harris under the persona of Uncle Remus, preserving plantation-era oral traditions.

In Behind the Mule, Michael C. Dawson argues that for African Americans, race remains the primary political unifier, with economic class playing a limited role, and proposes a new theory of group interests based on linked fates and economic subordination.

An exploration of African American Hoodoo traditions, examining their emergence and spread through the African Religion Complex.

This is the same book as the author's Voodoo Tales.

Lou Prentice leaves London for Nyasaland to rescue her cousin’s orphaned son and bring him home, a journey that tests her resolve and sense of duty.

A teenage girl at an exclusive boarding school in the late 1960s journals her life, hoping to revisit it when she turns sixteen.