Resolve to learn: Make history part of your 2025 resolutions
Two great options: The Reading with Rachelle podcast and the History Book Club
For the last two weeks, I’ve been both heads-up and heads-down while selecting history books that I, readers, and my podcast listeners can immerse ourselves in this year. It was hard to choose. But it’s such a glorious problem to have as an adult—so many options that tell the real contributions and experiences of Black Americans—instead of opposite problem I had as a kid in elementary school where my textbooks included only slavery and Africa, which were “covered” dismissively and through a white supremacy lens. My textbooks were probably one of the 3,000 that author Donald Yacovone reviewed while writing, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. Yet another book I’d like to read this year.
Next week I’ll discuss what’s coming next on my Reading with Rachelle podcast. Today, I want to share the books my Uniting Through History Book Club will be reading, why I chose them, and invite you to join us. We meet the last Wednesday of each month via Zoom at 7:00 PM CT.
January - February Book
Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too by Ijeoma Oluo
The title grabbed my attention and captured my mood when I stumbled upon this book last November. Whatever area you are passionate about and want to change is seemingly covered, including education, health, media, housing, labor, and policing. Oluo not only shares examples of action people are taking, but ends every section with “Be a Revolution” which lists dozens of specific ways readers can take action. I’ve just started this book and ways in which I can do more are swirling through my brain. I just found (and subscribed to) Ijeoma Oluo’s Substack column:
Join us 1/29/25 and 2/26/25 at 7:00 PM CT to discuss Be a Revolution.
March - April Book
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson
I love this cover. I mean, talk about kick-ass. It looks like a scene from a movie. I first spotted We Refuse on a shelf behind the counter while buying nearly $200 worth of books at Black Garnet Books, a Black, woman, and queer-owned bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota last November. I begged the woman ringing up my books to let me hold We Refuse in my hands. The words on the jacket cover made me beg her to sell it to me:
Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.
If you’re still not sold on reading it, author Joshunda Sanders wrote an excellent review:
Join us 3/26/25 and 4/30/25 at 7:00 PM CT to discuss We Refuse.
May - June Book
Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Kerri K. Greenidge
Since I started researching for my historical nonfiction (and now middle grade historical fiction) books, nineteenth and twentieth century Black newspapers have been a critical part of that research. Black Radical has been sitting on my bookshelf, beckoning me to pick it up and read it, for over a year. It’s a biography of William Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa Harvard grad in 1895, who founded one of the most important national Black newspapers in 1901, the Guardian. He was fearless and radical in his pursuit of Black liberation. Both the journalist and history-lover in me look forward to finally reading this book.
Join us 5/28/25 and 6/25/25 at 7:00 PM CT to discuss Black Radical.
July - August Book
The Colored Convention Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson
Just as Black newspapers played an active role in activism, so did the Colored Conventions through their local and national conferences throughout the U.S. While researching for my books, I’ve seen them mentioned in articles found in Black newspapers as well. So I was excited to find a book that provides information on the conventions and their efforts on social justice issues, lynching/mob violence prevention, and advocating for voting, education, and other rights for Black Americans. The following writers and authors contributed essays to The Colored Convention Movement:
Erica L. Ball, Kabria Baumgartner, Daina Ramey Berry, Joan L. Bryant, Jim Casey, Benjamin Fagan, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Eric Gardner, Andre E. Johnson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Sarah Lynn Patterson, Carla L. Peterson, Jean Pfaelzer, Selena R. Sanderfer, Derrick R. Spires, Jermaine Thibodeaux, Psyche Williams-Forson, and Jewon Woo.
Did you know there’s an Iowa connection to the Colored Conventions? Leslie Schwalm, who I interviewed on Ep. 5 of Reading with Rachelle about her book, Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America, is co-director of the Iowa Satellite of the national Colored Conventions Project.
Join us 7/30/25 and 8/27/25 at 7:00 PM CT to discuss The Colored Convention Movement.
September - October Book
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America by Paul Kix
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live reads like a thriller, introducing the reader to the civil rights leaders—Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, and a lesser-known side of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—behind the 1963 Birmingham campaign to end segregation. Starting ten weeks before the campaign, the tension builds as Kix shows the challenges and events leading up to the campaign. I cried at the campaign’s culmination—but I won’t say more in an attempt to avoid spoilers. I read this book in 2023 in preparation for my interview with Kix for the Des Moines Public Library AViD series:
Join us 9/24/25 and 10/29/25 at 7:00 PM CT to discuss You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live.
November - December Book
Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality By Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Yet another person I’m amazed that I’ve never heard of. I found this book while at The Book Vault in Oskaloosa, Iowa and learned from the book cover that Constance Baker Motley was a woman of many firsts:
The first Black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court … she went on to become the first Black woman elected to the state senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan borough president, and the first Black woman appointed to federal judiciary.
With a coincidental (to me) tie-in to the previous months’ book, she also defended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham as the sole woman on the NAACP’s legal team, plus “played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South.”
Join us 11/26/25 and 12/17/25 at 7:00 PM CT to discuss Civil Rights Queen.
I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative which features nearly 60 independent journalists and writers. I’m over my word word count so I can’t list members or favorite columns this week. Subscribe to the Weekly Roundup to get the links to what we’ve written about each week.