Overview:
As debates over censorship and historical erasure intensify, Power Read 25 offers a reading list that centers Black women's achievements. These biographies demonstrate how their lives can inspire resistance, imagination and collective progress.
Reading a biography is an act of discovery. We get to learn how the protagonists thought, imagined, made core decisions and overcame obstacles within the context of their own lived experiences.
But these biographies by Black women also offer blueprints for radical change centered around their stories and perspectives. They challenge injustice, preserve culture, advance knowledge or change how we see ourselves and our possibilities.
A week set aside to call out Banned Books by the American Library Association quickly passed. Yet stories by and about Black women — in bound books and in lived experience — are omitted and excluded from the public discourse every day. So we launched Power Read 25, a national initiative sponsored by Unerased | Black Women Speak, celebrating the lives, leadership, creativity, and legacy of Black women through biography.
This collection of powerful biographies written by equally powerful biographers brings Black women’s lives and contributions into sharper focus. They feature lessons about imagination, self-determination, intellectual freedom and the courage to chart one’s path. Many of the women featured in the biographies are at the top of the Banned Book lists.
This is an invitation for readers to consider what these titles can teach, and how they can literally transform our lives and communities for the better.
This collection of powerful biographies written by equally powerful biographers brings Black women’s lives and contributions into sharper focus.
As you reflect on each principle, answer these probes: Which title resonates with you? Which would benefit you, your community or the youth in your lives? All engagement is helpful as we endeavor to create a world where we can be well, prosper and experience love, joy and peace — unbothered by the “theys”.
Here are a dozen titles from our 25 biographies featuring stories, issues and truths that those who banned books don’t want you to read.
- Build Power from the Ground Up
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Barbara Ransby. University of North Carolina Press, 2003 (Second Edition, 2023).
Ransby traces Ella Baker’s five decades of organizing, from the NAACP to her role in founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where she championed grassroots, group-centered leadership over charismatic figureheads. For Black women who have carried movements without receiving credit, Baker’s life shows that the quiet work of building people up can be the most radical leadership of all.
- Turn Vision into Institutions
A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune. Noliwe Rooks. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.
Rooks shows how Bethune, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, turned a small school for Black girls in Daytona into Bethune-Cookman University, founded the National Council of Negro Women, and became an influential adviser in the Roosevelt administration. Her story models what it means for Black women to build institutions that outlast them: dreams last longest when you build the structures to hold them.
- Find Poetry in Everyday Life
A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. Angela Jackson. Beacon Press, 2017.
Poet Angela Jackson portrays Brooks, the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, as an artist who found her material in the kitchenettes and street corners of Chicago’s South Side. Brooks reminds Black women that their ordinary lives, neighborhoods, and voices are worthy subjects for great art.
- Turn Your Obsession Into Your Mission
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. Susana M. Morris. Amistad, 2025.
Morris follows Butler from a shy girl in Pasadena to a groundbreaking science fiction writer and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient in a genre that rarely made room for Black women. Butler’s relentless dedication to her craft shows what is possible when a Black woman refuses to let anyone else define the limits of her imagination.
- Live Beyond the Rules of Respectability
Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Tara T. Green. University of North Carolina Press, 2024.
Green looks at the writer, educator, and activist behind the polished public image, including her troubled marriage to Paul Laurence Dunbar, her relationships with women, and her work for suffrage and anti-lynching causes. Her life speaks to Black women who feel caught between the expectations placed on them and the fuller, more complicated selves they actually live.
- Confront the Atrocities of Enslavement
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. Nikki M. Taylor. Ohio University Press, 2016.
Taylor reconstructs the 1856 escape of Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter rather than see her returned to slavery, a story that later inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The book asks readers to face the specific violence enslavement inflicted on Black mothers and to understand Garner’s act as a response to that violence rather than madness.
- Recognize the Power of Your Voice
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Keisha N. Blain. Beacon Press, 2021.
Blain centers Hamer’s speeches and ideas, showing how a Mississippi sharecropper with a sixth-grade education became one of the most powerful voices for voting rights and human dignity. Hamer’s legacy tells Black women that their voices carry authority without credentials or anyone’s permission.
- Let Your Art Reflect Your Convictions
Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. Yale University Press, 2021.
Colbert presents the author of A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway, as a committed activist whose politics shaped every part of her writing. Hansberry shows Black women creatives that art and activism don’t have to be separate callings.
- Be Audacious in What You Demand
My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations. Mary Frances Berry. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Berry recovers the story of Callie House, a widowed washerwoman who led a mass movement in the 1890s demanding pensions for formerly enslaved people, and was persecuted by the federal government for it. House’s courage reminds Black women that demanding what is owed is not too much to ask, even when the powerful insist otherwise.
- Value and Preserve Your Culture
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Valerie Boyd. Scribner, 2003.
Boyd’s biography follows Hurston from all-Black Eatonville, Florida, through the Harlem Renaissance and her fieldwork collecting Black Southern folklore, which fed classics like Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s life argues that Black women’s language, stories, and traditions are treasures worth recording and celebrating, not leaving behind.
- Live Your Unapologetic Truth
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
Gumbs writes an expansive, poetic biography of the self-described Black lesbian feminist poet whose work on silence, anger, and self-care still shapes how we talk about identity and survival. Lorde gives Black women permission to name every part of themselves and to treat caring for themselves as an act of resistance.
- Use Your Influence to Open Doors
Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship. Dana A. Williams. Amistad, 2025.
Williams documents Toni Morrison’s years as a senior editor at Random House, where she championed writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis before and alongside her own rise as a novelist. Morrison’s editorship shows Black women that reaching a position of power means more when you use it to bring others in with you.
To learn more about the Power Read 25 initiative and how to activate the list, visit Power Read 25 – Unerased
Tracy Chiles McGhee is a multi-genre writer and Project Director for Unerased | Black Women Speak.
