I've Never Been So Impressed With a Book Series Before

[image description: The book cover of Black History for Beginners by Denise Dennis and illustrated by Susan Willmarth. There’s a drawing of a slave ship in the background and Black people from various ethnicities and time periods in the foreground.]

I’m not proud of being ignorant, though the only way I can become more intelligent is if I’m humble enough to admit what I don’t know.

I’ve always been hungry for knowledge, so what I don’t know isn’t for lack of trying. I could rant for hours about how my private primary education at a fundamentalist Baptist elementary school and my public secondary education at a small-town Alabama high school failed me. Suffice it to say, there’s a LOT I don’t know, especially when it comes to history. This is especially true with Black history.

Let’s just say it was so bad that I didn’t know the 16th Street Church Bombing actually happened––and wasn’t just a plot point in The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963––until I was 13. THIRTEEN. Again, this is not something I’m proud of. This realization, however, is what led me to question everything in school and seek out information for myself. Not just question what I was taught, but also what I wasn’t taught.

And that’s what brings me to today’s post. I happened to see Black History for Beginners, written by Denise Dennis and illustrated by Susan Willmarth, on Bookspace Columbus’s Instagram (whom you should follow because I get so many great social justice-centric book recs from him). The idea of a beginner book appealed to me because you don’t know what you don’t know, so I didn’t want to assume an intermediate book or a doorstopper of a tome was what I needed.

The coolest thing about Black History for Beginners is that it’s in comic form! This isn’t to say it was simple at all––simple and accessible are different things. The book is accessible and intellectually stimulating at the same time. There was so much I didn’t know.

By the end of the book, I thought, I learned more from this one book than I did in years of history classes! They should use this book in schools! Maybe they do and I just don’t know about it. At any rate, I was hooked, so I did what I always do when I find a new book I enjoy: look up the publisher.

Turns out For Beginners Books has an entire catalog of comic books about serious topics. African History. Arabs and Israel. Anarchism. The Chicano Movement. Dada and Surrealism. Eastern Philosophy. Existentialism. Freemasonry. Gender and Sexuality. Classical music. Linguistics. Music theory. Postmodernism. The prison industrial complex. Relativity and quantum physics. Unions. Women’s history. And tons more!

I don’t know about you, but there are a lot more topics from their catalog of books that I didn’t learn about in school, so I plan on buying many, many more books from the For Beginners series. (And for what it’s worth, no one is paying me to say any of this. I really am just that impressed.) I keep thinking about how much smarter I’d be if I knew about these books earlier. The good news is that it’s never too late.