I edited my original list (to take out less legitimate scholars like Thomas Sowell)
But I would add in: Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor - Race For Profit is a book that every Black American should read, because it concerns daily Black life; Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing The Black Body is one of the most important works of history and sociology on the Black legal and medical experience here in the U.S. (Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid also falls into this category); Saidiya Hartman and her book Scenes of Subjection, for a much more fundamental and philosophical understanding of the brutality of chattel slavery; Robin D.G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe for the most robust writing I've yet experienced on the Black labor struggle in the South and the USSR, and Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism for a history of the Black radical tradition.
Alongside the original people I put in, I would add Gerald Horne, Khalil G. Muhammad, Jared Ball, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Cheryl I. Harris, Achille Mbembe, Frank B. Wilderson, and Jared Sexton.