Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

A PBS NewsHour Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year in Nonfiction
Winner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers.

Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life.

Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students.

Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America."

Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

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Farah Jasmine Griffin (Ph.D. Yale), is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II; and Read Until You Understand: New and Selected Essays, among other works.