Race and the American Story also actively seeks to engage with new students, faculty and community members who want to be a part of our community of scholars.
Community members are welcome to participate by engaging in our conversation forum, joining our reading group, and reading our reading list. Students at our participating locations are also able to enroll in the Race and American Story course, as well.
If you are a faculty member at an institution that currently doesn’t offer the Race and the American Story course, contact us and we’ll start a conversation about how to bring the curriculum to your university or college.
Join the book club
Each semester, as a collective community, we will be reading and discussing a book that focuses on the broad topic of “race and the American story.” We will engage in a moderated online discussion of the book–its themes, concepts, and approach–on this website.
For the Spring semester 2020, we read Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf.
The Spring semester 2021 book we will explore is Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine, one of America’s foremost scholars on racial justice.
The Race and the American Story Book Club discussion board will be open and available to our students as well as to the wider community so that we can engage widely and learn from each other.
Race and American Story Reading List
As part of its mission to drive conversations about race in American society, we encourage our community and students to read these texts and books that have played a major influence on race in the United States.
And join the conversation around this reading list on our community conversations forum.
Speech at Springfield, Illinois (July 17, 1858)
Stephen A. Douglas
Lynch Law in All Its Phases
Ida B. Wells Barnett
Atlanta Exposition Address
Booker T. Washington
My View of Segregation Laws
Booker T. Washington
The Fruits of Industrial Training
Booker T. Washington
Has America a Race Problem: If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?
Anna Julia Cooper
Declaration of Principles of the Niagara Movement
W.E.B. DuBois
The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. DuBois
Brown v. Board of Education
How It Feels to be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston
Letter to the Orlando Sentinel
Zora Neale Hurston
Message to Grassroots
Malcolm X
A Declaration of Independence
Malcolm X
The Ballot or the Bullet
Malcolm X
At the Audubon
Malcolm X
The Power of Non-Violence
Martin Luther King, Jr
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Martin Luther King, Jr
I Have a Dream
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I See the Promised Land
Martin Luther King, Jr.
A More Perfect Union
Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope, Chap. 7 “Race”
Barack Obama
Letter to my Son
Ta-Nehisi Coates
An Address on John Brown, 1881
Frederick Douglass
Declaration of Independence
Draft of the Declaration, Paragraph on slavery
Thomas Jefferson
Notes on the State of Virginia, selections from Queries 14 and 18
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to Benjamin Banneker
Thomas Jefferson
U.S. Constitution
Federalist 54 (on 3/5ths clause)
Memorandum on an African Colony for Freed Slaves
James Madison
On Being Brought from Africa to America
Phillis Wheatley
To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth
Phillis Wheatley
February 14, 1776 Letter to Obour Tanner
Phillis Wheatley
March 11, 1774 Letter to Reverend Samson Occum
Phillis Wheatley
Democracy in America chapter on “The Three Races”
Alexis de Tocqueville
Ain’t I A Woman?
Sojourner Truth
Bury Me in a Free Land
Frances Harper
We are all Bound Up Together
Frances Harper
What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
Frederick Douglass
My Bondage and My Freedom, Chapter 17
Frederick Douglass
Our Composite Nationality
Frederick Douglass
Prejudice Not Natural
Frederick Douglass
Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln
Frederick Douglass
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Speech on the Dred Scott Decision
Abraham Lincoln
We encourage you to reach out to us if you’d like to discuss new ways to engage the community.
