Top ten books for Black History month

John A. Kirk, the George W Donaghey professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is author of Martin Luther King Jr (2005) and Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970 (2002), and editor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: Controversies and Debates.

At the Guardian, Kirk named his top ten books for Black History month. (Black History Month is celebrated annually in the United States and Canada in February and the United Kingdom in October.) One title on the list:

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J Sugrue

We often think of the civil rights movement as a distinct episode in the history of the US south. More recent studies like Sugrue's have shown that discrimination against African Americans existed nationwide, as did African American struggles to overcome it. His book not only challenges us to reconsider the chronology of the movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s, but also shifts its geographic coordinates to marshal an enormous wealth of research and an impressively diverse range of events.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Sweet Land of Liberty is one of John McWhorter's top ten under-recognized books on race.

--Marshal Zeringue