Become an Ally

Now is the time to show up in solidarity. How do we do that?  For those of us that are White, we must do the work!  Racism isn’t a Black or Brown or Asian or Indigenous/First Nations problem- it is a White problem caused by the white supremacy that our Country was built on.  To end white supremacy we must intentionally become anti-racist.  We must educate ourselves on the legacies of slavery and how those legacies impact us today.  We must educate ourselves by listening and learning from the voices of people of color while we re-learn what we thought we knew and what was left out of our history books and classrooms.

Listed on this page are a number of resources to help you “Do the Work”.  This is not an exhaustive list, but a beginning.

Suggested Books on John Brown, Slavery and Black History:

• Fire From the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown by Louis A. DeCaro Jr.
• Cloudsplitter by Russel Banks (a historical novel on John Brown)
• John Brown by W.E.B DuBois
• American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
• Beyond Freedom’s Reach by Adam Rothman
• Complicity:  How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank
• Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones- Rogers
• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America by Kahlil Gibran Muhammad
• Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy by Eric Forner
• The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

This website provides an excellent reading list for Slavery, Resistance and Reparations for elementary age through adult. https://socialjusticebooks.org/booklists/slavery/