Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Very Short Introductions Books

Recommendations

Every 2 weeks we send out an e-mail with 12 Book Recommendations by genre. Subscribe today! Click here for all past recommendations.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. was born in the year 1968 in Moss Point, Mississippi. He was raised at St. Peter’s Apostolic Catholic Church in Pascagoula, which is a parish administered by the Josephites.

Eddie is an intellectual that speaks on the complex dynamics of the American experience, having written books that take a wide look at black communities, the challenges our democracy faces, and the difficulties of race in the United States. He’s also an American critic in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Baldwin. Through his writings, the country’s complexities, vulnerabilities, and the chances for hope are brought into full view.

Known to be a convener of debates and discussions, he takes care to engage citizens of all backgrounds and ages—from fellow academics, young activists, commentators, journalists, and followers on Twitter in a dialogue about the nation’s direction. His scholarship and his sense of himself being a public intellectual are driven by his commitment to think carefully with other people in public.

He graduated from Morehouse College in 1989, where he was the Student Government President. He has a master’s degree in religion from Princeton. Eddie earned his PhD in religion from Princeton and is one of the founding members and a Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project. Eddie also has a master’s degree in African American studies from Temple University.

He started his teaching career at Bowdoin College where he served as a chair of the Department of Religion. He has gotten many awards which include the Carl A. Fields Award, and was also a Visiting Scholar in African-American Studies at Amherst College and Harvard University.

“Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America” received the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize.

Eddie’s appeared on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and NBC Meet the Press. He appeared with Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, in the documentary “Stand”, which was directed and produced by Tavis Smiley.

He is a contributor to the Huffington Post and is well known for being a regular panelist and contributor during the State of the Black Union. In the year 2007, he gave the Founder’s Day Convocation keynote address during the 140th anniversary of Morehouse College.

Eddie originally envisioned his book “Begin Again” as an intellectual biography on James Baldwin. However he ran into this wall, with year after year going by without having written a single sentence.

During a sabbatical from Princeton, he rented an apartment in St. Thomas, thinking if he was going to actually write about Baldwin, he’d need to be out of the country. Baldwin once said that the best way to think about America isn’t to actually be in America. Due to Hurricane Maria, he had to go to Heidelberg, Germany. In just an hour after he’d arrived, he witnessed a terrifying scene at a train station which altered the trajectory of this book. Four white cops piled on top of a distraught Black guy. One cop had his knee in the guy’s back, with the others twisting his arms.

He went back to his apartment and wrote furiously. He realized what it was that he had to do. He had to work through his own despair and rage, and offer an account of this moment.

Eddie was an undergrad at Morehouse when he first read “The Fire Next Time”, and found he was fascinated by the author’s ability to hang onto love and rage at the same time. He’d waited this long to read his work seriously because he knew what Baldwin would do to him, and how seriously he took the dictum that an unexamined life isn’t worth living.

It was also Baldwin’s outspokenness that helped Eddie become a much more ambitious writer. He knew that if he was going to be able to take such a risk on the page, he’d have to get honest with himself. It made him wrestle with his own complicated past. Part of this involves facing the fact that his dad put fear into his gut at a very young age. It’s made Eddie attempt to prove that he’s not scared ever since then. He still has these clusters of stories around this fear that he’s got to write through.

“Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2016. A powerful polemic on the state of Black America which savages the concept of a post-racial society.

America’s major promise of equality has rung hollow to African American ears, and always has. However today the situation has gotten that much more dire. From the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, the murders of black youth by cops, to the disasters visited on middle-class and poor black families because of the Great Recession. It is obvious that black America faces an emergency at the same moment the first black president’s been elected that prompted many to think we’d solved the race problem in America.

This book is Eddie’s impassioned response, and is part memoir, part manifesto, and part history. It argues that we live in a country that’s been founded on a “value gap”, with white lives being valued more than others, which still distorts our politics to this day. Whether discussing why every American has racial habits which reinforce inequality, why just remaking democracy from the ground up can bring on real change, and why black politics from the civil-rights era have hit a dead end, he’s crystallized the untenable position of black America. He also offers up thoughts on a better way moving forward.

Forceful ideas and is unsettling in its candor, this is a landmark book on race in America, one which promises to spark wide conversation while moving toward the end of our first black presidency.

In this book, Eddie presents an unfiltered yet idealistic view of the state of race in America. He presents a book written about and for Black people, and he presents what Black people have collectively learned from history and offers an analysis of the lens through which we were supposed to view all of it.