Listed: February 2025

The 2025 Black History Month theme is African Americans and Labor, focusin on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people and the transformational work that we have done throughout the African Diaspora.

In 1926 Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the son of formerly enslaved parents, a former sharecropper and miner, and the second Black person to receive a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University—sent out a press release announcing the first Negro History Week. He was the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the organization that works to continue his legacy by maintaining Black History month. In a recent press release, Dr. Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead, the national president of ASALH, wrote the following.

“We have been standing as a lighthouse proudly proclaiming the importance of Black History and helping people to understand that it is only through studying the quilted narrative of our historical journey that one can clearly see the silences, blind spots, hypocrisies, and distortions of American history.

We do not celebrate because we are given permission, we celebrate because we are the permission givers. We do not wait for Black History Month to be proclaimed, we proclaim it. We do not wait to be seen, we see ourselves. We do not have to be told the story of America because we are writing it, we are telling it, we are owning it, and we are pointing the way to it.”
Here’s a link to the complete message.

My plan here is to lift up the labor of Black creative talents by providing a booklist everyday this month (except today!) to celebrate Black literature for middle grade and young adult readers. I’m sharing these books, written by Black authors for ALL readers. Let’s allow ALL young readers to sample from all the great storytellers who nurture our curiosity, inform our intellect, and help us feel loved. I hope I’m not being too ambitious by trying to do this every day in February!

These lists are not meant to be comprehensive. Hopefully, they’ll introduce you to new books or authors. I’d love to learn about new to me books and authors so feel free to use the comment section. Maybe they’ll generate conversation or get you to think of similar. Maybe you’ll put together a little book group, see an author to invite to speak, find titles to add to your library’s collection, or give some of the books as gifts.  Maybe you’ll fight a little harder to keep these voices in your libraries.

You might even use them to plan an African American Read In. This is a program that began back in 1990 by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English to situate the celebration of literature into February’s many programs and activities.

OK, here we go! A list a day! I’ll see you tomorrow!

Filed under: Programs/Programming