study: the Black August syllabus
Living Black August, one principle at a time.
You can't fight what you don't understand. Below is: 41 books, a few podcasts, and museums worth traveling to. You don't have to read it all. Pick one. Start there.
READ
Where Black August was born
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson: George L. Jackson
Blood in My Eye: George L. Jackson
Assata: An Autobiography: Assata Shakur
Revolutionary Suicide: Huey P. Newton
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story: Elaine Brown
Live from Death Row: Mumia Abu-Jamal
We Are Our Own Liberators: Jalil Muntaqim
I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner: Russell "Maroon" Shoatz
The history they never taught you
The Mis-Education of the Negro: Carter G. Woodson
Lies My Teacher Told Me: James W. Loewen
A People's History of the United States: Howard Zinn
Stamped from the Beginning: Ibram X. Kendi
The Humanity Archive: Jermaine Fowler
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class: Blair LM Kelley
Revolution & liberation theory
The Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon
Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire
The Black Jacobins: C.L.R. James
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: Walter Rodney
The Communist Manifesto: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
Are Prisons Obsolete?: Angela Y. Davis
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Angela Y. Davis
Golden Gulag: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Rebellion & resistance (the long tradition)
American Negro Slave Revolts: Herbert Aptheker
The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents
To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown: Stephen B. Oates
Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas: Richard Price (ed.)
Jailbreak Out of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman: Butch Lee
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Harriet Jacobs
Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s: Gerald Horne
The movement, then and now
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: Charlie Cobb
The Making of Black Revolutionaries: James Forman
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC: Judy Richardson
Agents of Repression: Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall
War Against the Panthers: Huey P. Newton
The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History: David F. Walker
When They Call You a Terrorist: Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele
Killing Rage: Ending Racism: bell hooks
Imagining freedom (fiction & essays)
Kindred: Octavia E. Butler
Octavia's Brood: adrienne maree brown & Walidah Imarisha (eds.)
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Alice Walker
As Black as Resistance: Zoé Samudzi & William C. Anderson
Anarchism and the Black Revolution: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin
LISTEN
Black History Year (PushBlack): deep dives into the thinkers and movements left out of the textbooks
Seizing Freedom (VPM) :the story of Black Americans defining freedom after slavery, in their own words
The Black History Buff: history that hits, in bite-sized episodes (confirm still active)
VISIT
The Legacy Museum: Montgomery, AL (Equal Justice Initiative): slavery to mass incarceration, the throughline Black August lives in
Black Panther Party Museum: downtown Oakland (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation)
The Women of the Black Panther Party Mural: West Oakland
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: Harlem, NYC
National Museum of African American History & Culture: Washington, D.C
You don't have to read it all. Just start. That's how every freedom fighter started.