BOOKS

Please note: most of these books contain textual or artistic representations of violence which may be troubling for young readers; parents, guardians and educators should review the books and use their own discretion in assigning these readings.

 

Picture books which contain explicit references to violence are preceded by an asterisk.

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FOR KIDS UNDER 10:​

• *If You Lived When There Was Slavery In America

• *Chasing Freedom

• Before She Was Harriet

• Moses

• Only Passing Through

• When Harriet Met Sojourner

• Henry’s Freedom Box

• Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt

• Show Way

• Follow the Drinking Gourd

• *Let The Truth Be Told

• *Yours for Justice, Ida B. Wells: The Daring Life of a Crusading Journalist

• Mumbet's Declaration of Independence

• Words Set Me Free: The Story of Young Frederick Douglass (with Audio Recording)

• *Never Forgotten

• Love Twelve Miles Long​

• The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch

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FOR KIDS 10-13:

• Meet Addy: An American Girl

• Meet Kaya: An American Girl

• Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway

• Elijah of Buxton

• Jefferson's Sons: A Founding Father’s Secret Children

• Amos Fortune: Free Man

• Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent: How Daring Slaves and Free Blacks Spied for the Union During the Civil War

• Kidnapped Prince The Life of Olaudah Equiano

• The Old African

• Chains

• Amistad: A Long Road to Freedom

• How I Became a Ghost

• The Birchbark House

• In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse

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FOR TEENS 14 AND UP:

• Copper Sun

• Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley

• Surrender Tree El Arbol de la Rendicion Poems of Cubas Struggle for Freedom

• Beloved

• 47

• The Black History of the White House

• Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

• The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano​

• Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation

 

FOR ADULTS:

• Twelve Years a Slave

• Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880

• Ar'n't I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South​

• Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South

• Stamped From the Beginning

• A People's History of the United States

• Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America

• ​The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

• Lies My Teacher Told Me and How American History Can be Used as a Weapon​

• The Color of Law: a Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America 

• Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy

• ​The Warmth of Other Suns

• Women, Race, & Class

• Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:An Indian History of the American West

• The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

• Living in Two Worlds: The American Indian Experience