The Diversity Book Club that began in the summer of 2008 after a tragedy in our community (I wrote more here: First BAND post: Favorite Nonfiction) had our Annual Book Selection and Potluck Meeting last night. It was so much fun! Good food, fun conversation among a wonderful company of people, and lots of books to consider. We chose nine books to read in the next year and left a lot more on the table that we want to consider again in the future. So, today’s post contains, first, the short list of the nine books we selected and, second, the long list of books that were proposed.

The nine books on the schedule for the Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group (also known as Diversity Book Club) 2011-2012:

• Never Been a Time: the 1917 race riot that sparked the civil rights movement by Harper Barnes
• Native Stranger: a black American’s journey into the heart of Africa by Eddy L. Harris
• Sister Citizen: shame, stereotypes, and Black women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
• Unbowed: a memoir by Wangari Muta Maathai
• At the Dark End of the Street: black women, rape, and resistance : a new history of the civil rights movement, from Rosa Parks to the rise of Black power by Danielle L. McGuire
• Color Me English: thoughts about migrations and belonging before and after 9/11 by Caryl Phillips
• Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride
• Searching for Whitopia: an improbable journey to the heart of white America by Rich Benjamin
• killing rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks

Here are all the other books we brought or mentioned last night. For the most part, these are not books that any of us have read. We tend to propose books we want to read.

• From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline Tobin
• A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight
• The Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel by M. Glenn Taylor
• Like One of The Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life by Alice Childress and Trudier Harris
• Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neely
• Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years by Sarah L. Delany, A. Elizabeth Delany and Amy Hill Hearth
• Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South by Susan Tucker
• Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence by Keli Goff
• Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick
• Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America by David S. Reynolds
• Fail Up: 20 Lessons on Building Success from Failure by Tavis Smiley
• The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
• A White Teacher Talks about Race by Julie Landsman
• Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball