The 2024 Book Award winner was “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class” by acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley. Spanning two hundred years, “Black Folk” highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kelley weaves her ancestors’ story into the history, adding a personal, moving, and very human narrative.