'Black Bolshevik,
Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist'
By Harry Haywood (1978)
http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Harry-Haywood-Black-Bolshevik.pdf This book is good for many reasons, but the perspective it has makes it trump all other books covering American society in the early twentieth century.
Its view of the Harlem Renaissance and black American society generally including solid knowledgeable criticisms of the Garvey movement and of the NAACP & Urban League and the role their leaders have played in making black Americans conformist.
It's also the best history of the Communist Party USA including deep insight into its degeneration in the 1950's through personal experience.
The author is quite aware of racial issues & admirably consistently places them lower than class differences as he believed race is manipulated to divide the exploited class against itself which serves to maintain its weakness.
The author was radical and well read believing the overthrow of American government and its financial owners and the division of its land through redistribution to finish what post civil war reconstruction failed to accomplish is the ultimate answer to america's problems.
EDIT:
The author advocates revolution, not reform because he believes the American system is evil root and branch. Most of its defenders have been conditioned by schools and other propaganda methods to fight against their own class interests much like those poor common people who chose to serve or collaborate with fascism in Nazi Germany or the Confederate South. Harry Haywood's ideas are much more well thought out and sophisticated than the neo-communist movement of the 60's and 70's.
I have read that this author became a mentor of Malcolm X when he was trying to find his was after leaving the Nation of Islam.
It's worth mentioning that Haywood had a negative view of Roosevelt and the New Deal as being the saviours of capitalism and the American system. This is a striking difference of old left communists from American Democrats who are the old party of slavery that transformed its image into the saviour of capitalism in the 1930's. This book shows the ugly side of the New Deal and the heritage of the Democrat party in the 1930's South. One gets a sharp understanding from the author's life as a communist organiser in the U.S. (both North and South), and this is complemented by events in the Soviet Union where the author attended the Lenin School from 1925 to 1929.
For my purpose's, this book's communist perspective is somewhat like Russia Today in that it helps place the rhetoric of American Democrats such as the anti-Russian stances of Bill Maher and Anderson Cooper in a critical perspective without having to rely on the media of American Republicans which merely offer a different variety of fascism.