ABHM Book Club: Black In Blues by Imani Perry
We are pleased to announce ABHM’s May’s Book of the Month: Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry. We invite you to join us on May 30th at 1:30 p.m. for a discussion of the book at America’s Black Holocaust Museum or virtually via Zoom.
History Toward Tomorrow: Why This Matters
In the year 2026 the United States is celebrating its semiquincentennial. At ABHM, we are using this as an opportunity to create programs where we can collectively reflect on our country’s history honestly to build a better, more equitable future. The selections for the ABHM Book Club in 2026 will emphasize historical truth-telling, compelling storytelling, and diverse perspectives on our collective past. We invite participants to consider what they want the country to look like over the next 250 years. What can we learn from visionaries, historians, and thought leaders from the past in how we envision the United States of the future? In the spirit of Dr. Cameron, we invite you to join us on this journey of reflection, healing, and dreaming.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry is a lyrical and intellectually expansive meditation on the color blue as a through line in African American history and cultural expression. Blending memoir, art criticism, and historical analysis, Perry traces blue from the 17th-century indigo trade—where its cultivation was bound to the violence of the transatlantic slave economy—to its enduring symbolic power in Black life. She explores how blue signifies both the sorrow embedded in the “blues” tradition and a profound aesthetic of elegance, depth, and spiritual resonance. In Perry’s hands, blue becomes not merely a color but a language—one that carries memory, grief, creativity, and survival across centuries.
Moving fluidly between history and contemporary culture, Perry reflects on blue as it appears in music, fashion, visual art, and everyday life. She considers its presence in the work of artists such as Lorna Simpson and Firelei Báez, examining how their uses of blue evoke migration, ancestry, femininity, and power. Interwoven with personal reflection, the book treats “blue-black” as both a literal and conceptual marker—an evolving expression of identity shaped by beauty and brutality alike. Ultimately, Black in Blues presents the color as a strategy of interpretation and a vessel of collective meaning, illuminating how something as seemingly simple as hue can hold the layered story of a people.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Imani Perry is an acclaimed American interdisciplinary scholar, cultural critic, and author whose work spans law, literature, history, and African American studies. Born in 1972 in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Perry began her academic journey with a B.A. in American Studies and Literature from Yale University before earning both a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University, along with an L.L.M. in property and contract law from Georgetown University Law Center. Her scholarship focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and culture, exploring how creativity, identity, and resistance have shaped and been shaped by the African American experience. Perry has written for major publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and The Bitter Southerner, and she has held faculty positions at Rutgers University, Princeton University, and, most recently, Harvard University, where she is the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies, as well as a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Perry is the author of multiple influential nonfiction books that blend personal reflection with deep cultural and historical analysis. Her 2022 work South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a New York Times bestseller, affirming her voice as one of today’s leading interpreters of American life. Other notable titles include Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. In 2023 she was named a MacArthur Fellow, one of the highest honors for creative and scholarly achievement in the United States. Her most recent book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, continues her exploration of the symbolic and lived dimensions of race, art, and history.
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