​1. Lerone Bennett's' Before the Mayflower
2. John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom
3. John Blassingame's The Slave Community, 
4. Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History, and The Miseducation of The Negro
5. In African history, a few books would serve as an overview.
6. John G. Jackson's Introduction to African Civilizations,
7. Joseph Harris' African People and their History. The heavy weights in the fields,
8. Chancellor William's Destruction of Black Civilizations, and The Birth of African Civilization
9. Cheikh Anta Diop: African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality and Civilization Barbarism

10. Eric Williams, The Caribbean from Columbus to Castro, and Capitalism to Slavery: Documents in West Indian History.
11. For the importance of the African in world history, read three special issues of the Journal of African Civilizations, edited by Ivan Van Sertima read:

  • Africa in Early America,
  • Africa in Early Asia, and
  • Africa in Early Europe.


Reading these books will eventually lead to other books. Reading books should be like an addiction. It should take over your life and you should never let it go. Reading is the only positive addiction I know.

​Taken from an interview with John Henrick Clarke, published in the Los Angeles Times, 

by Yemi Toure, March 3, 1991

Authors You Should Know article

John Henrick Clarke's Bibliography