Recommendations
Books Like No Name in the Street by James Baldwin
For readers of Baldwin on the defeat of civil rights hope
If you loved No Name in the Street — Baldwin's dark meditation on the assassinations, the defeat of the civil rights movement, and the Black Panthers — these books share the same engagement with the political history of the 1960s and 1970s, the same willingness to reckon with defeat, and the same essayistic mode.
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Buy on AmazonThe Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
The essential companion and predecessor — the prophetic hopefulness of The Fire Next Time is the counterpoint to the darker despair of No Name in the Street; the two books together trace Baldwin's evolving view of America's racial situation across a decade.
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Buy on AmazonThe Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X
Malcolm X's autobiography — the companion in African American autobiography from the same era; Baldwin and Malcolm are the two great competing voices in Black American political discourse of the 1960s, and No Name in the Street reflects directly on Malcolm's legacy after his assassination.
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Buy on AmazonBetween the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's letter to his son — the contemporary companion in African American essayistic writing about race and the body; Coates is explicitly in the tradition of Baldwin's nonfiction, and Between the World and Me is the most important recent work in that tradition.
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Buy on AmazonSoul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver
Cleaver's essays from prison — the companion in African American political writing from the late 1960s and the book that most directly challenged Baldwin's analysis; reading both books together shows the full spectrum of Black political thought in the period No Name in the Street addresses.
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Buy on AmazonGiovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's companion novel — the formal achievement of his fiction alongside his nonfiction; the range between Giovanni's Room's personal, aesthetic mode and No Name in the Street's political, essayistic mode shows the full scope of Baldwin's intelligence.
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Buy on AmazonGo Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's debut novel — the essential companion in his fiction; the Harlem church community is the world Baldwin grew up in and is thinking about throughout his nonfiction.
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Buy on AmazonThe New Jim Crow
by Michelle Alexander
Alexander's study of mass incarceration — the contemporary companion in analysis of American racial injustice; where Baldwin examines specific assassinations and political defeats, Alexander examines the system that produced them as a structure.
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Buy on AmazonI Am Not Your Negro
by Raoul Peck
Peck's documentary based on Baldwin's unfinished manuscript about the three assassinations — the visual companion to No Name in the Street's written account of the same historical ground.
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