#TheNext400 Digital Roundtable: Intersection of African American and LGBTQ+ Identity

Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he’s lived in Hackney, London, for years. A flamboyant, wisecracking character with a dapper taste in retro suits, and a fondness for Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father, grandfather—and also secretly gay lovers with his childhood friend, Morris.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson

From one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious racial bias come stories, science, and strategies to address one of the central controversies of our time

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.