One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, is a 1973 screenplay by James Baldwin.

With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together is the 1998 autobiography of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. This married couple recalls their fifty years of life together and their experiences on stage and screen starting in the 1940s. As well, they remember their years of political activism and the famous figures, including Malcolm X and Sidney Poitier, they befriended.

In his hugely successful book, Roots: Saga of an American Family, first published in 1976, Alex Haley retells the stories his grandmother told him about his family's past generations, going back to the young African relative brought to America as a slave. The book spawned a television mini-series and earned the 1976 National Book Award and a 1977 Lillian Smith Book Award.

Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, originally published in 1928, is the story of two young black men who have different reactions to the colorful street life of Harlem during the 1920s.

Alice Walker's 1976 book, Meridian: A Novel, tells the story of Meridian, a high school dropout and single mother who learns about herself as she becomes a daring civil rights worker.