In recognition of Black History Month, VIU Library has curated a selection of books, films, and other resources on the history, culture, and contributions of Black authors and creators from British Columbia, Canada, the United States, and around the world. These works highlight stories of joy, resilience, activism, creativity, and community, while also addressing the ongoing impacts of systemic racism.
Browse the collection below for films, graphic novels, books, articles, and web sources.
Using her award-winning reporting skills, Eternity connects her own experience to the systemic issues plaguing students today. It's a memoir of pain, but also resilience.
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex―a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues―testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.
From the blistering cane fields of Barbados to the icy plains of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-drowned streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black teems with all the strangeness of life. This inventive, electrifying novel asks, What is Freedom? And can a life salvaged from the ashes ever be made whole?
Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women?s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.
In the twenty-first century, AfroFuturism—a historical and philosophical concept of the future imagined through a Black cultural lens—has been interpreted through a myriad of writers, artists, scientists, and other visionary creatives. In Afrocentricity in AfroFuturism: Toward Afrocentric Futurism, editor Aaron X. Smith curates a collection of interdisciplinary essays that critiques existing scholarship on Black futurity. In contrast to much previous work, these essays ground their explorations in African agency, centering the African within historical and cultural reality. Situating Afrocentricity as the field’s foundational root and springboard for an expansive future, contributors detail potential new modes of existence and expression for African people throughout the diaspora.
Kidnapped by his father on the eve of Somalia's societal implosion, Mohamed Ali was taken first to the Netherlands by his stepmother, and then later on to Canada. Unmoored from his birth family and caught between twin alienating forces of Somali tradition and Western culture, Mohamed must forge his own queer coming of age.
What follows in this fierce and unrelenting account is a story of one young man's nascent sexuality fused with the violence wrought by displacement.
Blank is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important contemporary writers and thinkers.Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen, by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Blank explores questions of race, the body politic, timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.
In honor of the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois's birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Library has prepared a new edition of Du Bois's classic, The Souls of Black Folk. Originally published in 1903, Souls introduced a number of now-canonical terms into the American conversation about race, among them double-consciousness, and it sounded the ominous warning that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. In a new introduction, Shawn Leigh Alexander outlines the historical context of this critical work and provides rare documents from the special collections archive at the Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Unlike Du Bois's more scholarly work, Souls blends narrative and autobiographical essays, and it continues to reach a wide domestic and international readership. This moving homage to black life and culture and its sharp economic and historical critique are more important than ever, resonating with today's unequivocal demand that Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.
North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era.
Still I rise: A graphic history of African Americans by 
Black History in its own words by 
March: Book two by 
March: Book three by 
The content of our caricature by 
Your Black friend and other strangers by Arnold, A. (2001). Courting Mifflin Gibbs. The Beaver, 81(2), 31-33. https://www.canadashistoryarchive.ca/canadas-history/the-beaver-apr-may-2001/flipbook/IFC/
Bishop, E., Collins, C.R., & Marshall, C. (2020). Black pioneers who made Salt Spring Island their home. British Columbia History, 53(2). 18-22. http://tinyurl.com/3btbuaxw
Cramp, B. (2008). Neighbourhood lost: Scratch the surface of a concrete overpass in Vancouver and you'll find memories of what once a lively Black community. The Beaver, 88 (2), 29-33. https://www.canadashistoryarchive.ca/canadas-history/the-beaver-apr-may-2008/flipbook/1/
De Sousa, I., Wytenbroek, L., Boschma, G., & Thorne, S. (2023). Reflections on Black Nurses’ Invisibility: Exploring the Contribution of Black Nurses to British Columbia (Canada), 1845-1910. Advances in Nursing Science. Advance online publication. https://go.exlibris.link/VnPQ6QFG
Jensen, P. (1999). Odyssey: B.C.'s Black pioneers. The Beaver, 29(1), 28-32. https://www.canadashistoryarchive.ca/canadas-history/the-beaver-feb-mar-1999/flipbook/C/
Landau-Donnelly, F. (2023). Ghostly murals: Tracing the politics of public art in Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 41(6), 1147–1165. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231172122
Lane, R. J. (2011). The first Black British Columbia novel: Truman Green's "A credit to your race". Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 17(2), 229-244. https://go.exlibris.link/sxZybcL4
Nesteroff, G. (2019). Wesley Ziegler's possum supper. British Columbia History, 52(3), 44. http://tinyurl.com/bdj6a6cs
Petrina, S., & Ross, E. W. (2021). Higher racism: The case of the University of British Columbia: On the wrong side of history but right side of optics. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 32, 12-25. https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/article/view/186661
Ralston, H.K. (1976/1977, Winter). John Sullivan Deas: A Black entrepreneur in British Columbia salmon canning. BC Studies, (32), 64-78. https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.v0i32.905
Souiedan, R. (2012). The curious case of Charles Mitchell. British Columbia History, 45(4), 15-18. https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0380646
Claxton, N. X., Fong, D., Morrison, F., O’Bonsawin, C., Omatsu, M., Price, J., & Sandhra, S. K. (2021). Challenging racist “British Columbia”: 150 years and counting. University of Victoria and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (BC Office). http://hdl.handle.net/1828/12776
Compton, W. (2007). Hogan's Alley: Mapping Vancouver's lost Black neighbourhood. In D. Davine (Ed.), Multiple lenses: Voices from the diaspora located in Canada (pp. 289-292). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. https://go.exlibris.link/6LscQWTn
Crawford, K. (with Rudder, A.). (2020). Go do some great thing: The Black pioneers of British Columbia (3rd ed.). Harbour Publishing. https://go.exlibris.link/yXXkMy5z (Original work published 1978)
Creese, G. (2011). The new African diaspora in Vancouver: Migration, exclusion and belonging. University of Toronto Press. https://go.exlibris.link/KgVjwn20
Creese, G. (2020). “Where are you from?”: Growing up African-Canadian in Vancouver. University of Toronto Press. https://go.exlibris.link/YVwmwxSV
Gibbs, M.W. (1995). Shadow and light: An autobiography with reminiscences of the last and present century. University of Nebraska Press. https://go.exlibris.link/gJY0ySy6 (Original work published 1902)
Marlatt, D., & Itter, C. (Eds.). (1979). Opening doors: Vancouver's East End. Province of British Columbia. https://bnm.bc.catalogue.libraries.coop/eg/opac/record/122242406
White, E. C. (2009). Every goodbye ain’t gone: A photo narrative of Black heritage on Salt Spring Island (J. Bealy, photographer). Dancing Crow Press. https://bnm.bc.catalogue.libraries.coop/eg/opac/record/30926624
Concord, A. L. (2016). Music and sonic space in Victoria, B.C., 1871-1886: The creation of British identity in a Canadian frontier town [Doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria]. UVicSpace. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/7679
Ismail, A. M. (2023). Navigating identity and belonging: The experiences of Black African refugee youth in higher education institutions in Canada [Master’s thesis, Carleton University]. Carleton University Institutional Repository. https://doi.org/10.22215/etd/2023-15603
Lewis, N. S. (2022). An insufficient record//Exploring the photo-ethics of preserving of Black Vancouver [Master’s thesis, Ontario College of Art & Design University]. OCAD University Open Research Repository. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3763
Mohamed, M. (2023). Reconstructing Vancouver’s Black community from the history of invisibility: Analysis of the role of Black entrepreneurship in British Columbia, Canada [Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia]. Open Collections. https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0431415
Sankofa, j. (2022). “All kinds of money”: Black women on the moving and the policing of urban alley workers, 1900-1935 [Doctoral dissertation, Yale University]. EliScholar. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/654
BC Black History Awareness Society. (n.d.). British Columbia's Black pioneers: Their industry and character influenced the vision of Canada. Digital Museums Canada. https://www.communitystories.ca/v2/bc-black-pioneers_les-pionniers-noirs-de-la-cb/
BC Black history Awareness Society. (n.d.). Places of interest guide. https://bcblackhistory.ca/learning-centre/places-of-interest-guide/
CBC Communications. (2023, January 21). CBC showcases Black voices, stories and experiences in honour of Black History Month. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/community/cbc-black-history-month-2023-1.6732472
CBC News. (2020, November 29). "All the dreadlocked rastas were White": B.C. poet sings about being Black in Nanaimo. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/being-black-in-nanaimo-1.5820521
Friedman, M. (Director). (n.d.). Secret Vancouver: A Return to Hogan’s Alley [Film]. TELUS Originals. https://watch.telusoriginals.com/view/65a6e704882aae5df80b7954
Fundira, M. (Host). (2021, July 27). Hogan's Alley [Audio podcast episode]. In A place to belong. Historica Canada. https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/podcasts/a-place-to-belong/a-place-to-belong-hogans-alley-episode-4
Hogan's Alley Society. https://www.hogansalleysociety.org/
Nanaimo African Heritage Society. https://nanaimoafricanheritagesociety.com/
UBC Applied Science. (n.d.). Black Canadian history and applied science: Virtual museum. https://apsc.ubc.ca/black-history-month-virtual-museum
Vancouver Black Library. https://www.vancouverblacklibrary.org/
Vancouver Heritage Foundation. (n.d.) Hogan's Alley. Places that matter: Community history resource. https://placesthatmatter.ca/location/hogans-alley/#historical
Vancouver is Awesome. (2020, October 7). Some of Salt Spring Island’s first settlers were former slaves [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMoiEWQ929U&list=PLjiAtBk7yDGgsKkxgzDXeQtgwINFMvzOT&index=7
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