BESTbooks
Here is a collection of books for all ages about the historic struggle of Black people. There are Black history books on this list about black people fighting for equal rights during the revolutionary war and the civil war, during the Jim Crow Era, and post-segregation.
Many of these books have been written by Black authors, but it is important to note that the publishing industry still publishes more books about Black and Brown people written by White authors than it does books about the Black experience written in Black voices. At a time when the nation is amplifying melanated voices, readers may want to prioritize books written by Black authors when selecting from this list.
For books about Black people fighting for equal rights in the modern era, check out this list of 50 books about race to read right now.
Picture books
1. Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace
written and illustrated by Ashley Bryan
Get it HERE.
This picture book memoir is about Ashley Bryan’s experience serving as a Black soldier in a segregated army in World War 2. Bryan recounts stories of racism on the front line as well as moments of kindness that saw him through. The text is supported by historical letters and diary entries.
2. Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave
written by Laban Carrick Hill and illustrated by Bryan Collier
Get it HERE.
Very little is known about Dave the Potter, a slave in South Carolina in the 1800s and a skilled potter. This book focuses on Dave’s pottery and shows in detail Dave working tirelessly, meticulously over his art. The book includes extensive back matter that gives historical details about Dave and includes some photographs of his surviving pottery.
3. The Bell Rang
written and illustrated by James E. Ransome
Get it HERE.
Ransome received a Corretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Award for this book about a runaway slave and the hope and fear his family experiences as they imagine that maybe – just maybe – he made it north to freedom.
4. A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
by Claire Hartfeld
Get it HERE.
A violent racial conflict erupts when a Black boy is killed by a White man throwing rocks after he swims too close to the white beach. This book looks deeply at racial conflict in America and includes lots of historical reference material and photos.
5. The Youngest Marcher: The Story of Audrey Faye Hendricks, a Young Civil Rights Activist
by Cynthia Levinson and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton
Get it HERE.
In this picture book that shows you are never too young to make a difference, Aubrey Faye Hendricks is nine years old when she decides to join the Children’s March in Birmingham to help end segregation.
6. Finding Langston
by Lesa Cline-Ransome
Get it HERE.
In 1946, Langston’s family moves north from Alabama to Chicago, where Langston discovers the non-segregated Chicago Public Library. He reads poetry by his namesake, Langston Hughes, and through poetry learns to cope with loss.
7. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968
by Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Get it HERE.
In 1968, after two Black sanitation workers are killed due to unsafe work conditions, sanitation workers go on strike. Martin Luther King, Jr. is called to Memphis help with the protests. In Memphis, Rev. Dr. King delivers his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and is assassinated the next day. This picture book recounts these events through the eyes of a child.
8. The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, and Harlem’s Greatest Bookstore
by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Get it HERE.
In the 1930s, Lewis Michaux Sr. opened a Harlem bookstore he named the National Memorial African Bookstore, which is visited by famous Black Americans such as Malcom X and Langston Hughes. The story of the bookstore’s contribution to helping people fight for equality is told through the eyes of Michaux’s son, Lewis Jr.
9. Let the Children March
by Monica Clark-Robinson and illustrated by Frank Morrison
Get it HERE.
Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired an amazing historical event known today as the Birmingham Children’s Crusade after he spoke in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Children marched and protested segregation laws. This has a powerful message that everyone’s voice can make a difference.
10. Before She Was Harriett
by Lesa Cline-Ransome and illustrated by James E. Ransome
Get it HERE.
This is a beautiful biography in verse about the woman we know today as Harriet Tubman but who was known by many different names during her lifetime as a spy and liberator.
11. Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life
written and illustrated by Ashley Bryan
Get it HERE.
This picture book looks at the monetary value of slaves according to plantation documents and contrasts the “so-called worth” of slaves against their self-worth and rich inner lives. This book is unique and unlike any other picture book on the market as it uses a combination of historical documents, poetry, and collage to deliver a powerful message about the worth of a human life.
12. The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery
by Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom Fradin and illustrated by Eric Velasquez
Get it HERE.
John Price is a runaway slave who crosses the Ohio River from Kentucky into Ohio. Price lives with the people of Oberlin, Ohio until the slave catchers come. When the townspeople hear of Price’s capture, some of them band together to secure his freedom. Price’s rescuer’s spend three months in jail and their subsequent abolitionist voices contributes to the unrest leading up to the Civil War.
Black History Books for Middle Grades
13. The Parker Inheritance
by Varian Johnson
Get it HERE.
Candance finds an old letter addressed to her grandmother, who was run out of town in shame. Her family doesn’t talk about it. When Candance reads the letter, she uncovers an injustice and a mystery. With the help of her best friend she sets out to set things right.
14. The Watsons go to Birmingham – 1963
by Christopher Paul Curtis
Get it HERE.
Kenny and his family travel to Birmingham, hoping Grandma can get Byron, Kenny’s 13-year-old brother, to straighten up. They end up in Birmingham during one of the most volatile parts of the entire civil rights era.
15. Lions of Little Rock
by Kristin Levine
Get it HERE.
Best friends Marlee and Liz do everything together until one day, Liz disappears and the rumor mill says she was passing White. Marlee doesn’t care and does everything in her power to find her friend.
16. Revolution
by Deborah Wiles
Get it HERE.
Revolution is the second book in the Sixties Trilogy. These three books can be read out of order, but characters from the first make a cameo on Revolution. This story takes place in Mississippi in 1964 during the Freedom Summer, a volunteer-led voter registration drive to register as many Black voters as possible. Revolution tells this story from Sunny’s perspective, a young girl who is coming of age during a revolution.
17. Fire From the Rock
by Sharon Draper
Get it HERE.
Fire From the Rock is about Sylvia, who has the opportunity to be one of the first black students to integrate into Central High School in 1957. Racial tensions turn her town into a powder keg. Sylvia decides to be a part of the change.
18. Stella By Starlight
by Sharon Draper
Get it HERE.
Stella lives in the Depression-era segregated south, a reality she has largely made peace with, when the KKK, which has been relatively quiet during her lifetime, decides to rear its ugly head. Stella is faced with violent racism and decides to fight back.
19. The Surrender Tree/El árbol de la rendición: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom/Poemas de la Lucha de Cuba por su Libertad
by Margarita Engle
Get it HERE.
Engle’s book is based on the true story of Rosa la Bayamesa, a field nurse in 1896 Cuba. Cuba has been torn apart by three wars and people have been placed in camps with not enough food, water, or supplies. Rosa turns caves into hidden hospitals and helps to heal her war-torn country.
20. Unbound
by Ann Burg
Get it HERE.
In this novel in verse, Grace is forced to work in the Big House instead of the slave cabins. Grace witnesses firsthand the cruelty of the plantation master and missus. Soon, Grace and her family are forced to flee to the Great Dismal Swamp, a story based off true events of slaves and Indigenous people forging long-term communities in swamps.
21. My Name is Henry Bibb: A Story of Slavery and Freedom
by Afua Cooper
Get it HERE.
Henry Bibb escaped slavery to become the founder of a Black newspaper. Author Afua Cooper spends the majority of this book on Bibb’s life in slavery before his escape to freedom, and the details of the cruelty he experienced are both necessary and harrowing.
22. Etched in Clay: The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet
by Andrea Cheng
Get it HERE.
History doesn’t know much about the man known as Dave the Potter, who made beautiful pottery and inscribed it with his name and short poems about his life as a slave. What we do know is recounted here in verse.
23. The Rock and the River
by Kekla Magoon
Get it HERE.
Sam’s father believes in nonviolent protest, but Sam’s brother and best friend Stick wants to join the Black Panthers. As Sam’s life unfolds against the backdrop of racial tension in 1968 Chicago, he must decide for himself which path he will follow.
24. Eliza’s Freedom Road: An Underground Railroad Diary
by Jerdine Nolen and illustrated by Shadra Strickland
Get it HERE.
After Eliza’s mother is sold to a different plantation and Eliza overhears talk of finding herself at the slave auction, Eliza decides to run away. She travels along the Underground Railroad with advice from her mother about how to safely travel at night ringing in her ears.
25. March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine
by Melba Pattillo Beals
Get it HERE.
Melba Beals recounts the story of how she became a renowned civil rights activist in this memoir. Beals is one of the Little Rock Nine, an author, and recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal. This is her story.
26. Remember: The Journey to School Integration
by Toni Morrison
Get it HERE.
Toni Morrison imagines fictional dialogue and inner narratives of children against the backdrop of photographs from the era of desegregation.
27. We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March
by Cynthia Levinso
Get it HERE.
In 1963, 4,000 children participated in the Children’s March to desegregate Birmingham. We’ve Got a Job tells this story through the eyes of four young marchers at the heart of the action.
Black History Books for Young Adults
28. Spite Fences: A Story of Hope, Redemption, and Justice in the 1960’s South
by Trudy Krishner
Get it HERE.
Spite Fences is set in the Jim Crow South and centers around Maggie Pugh, a 13-year-old who resents the limitations placed on poor people and black people – she’s both. Maggie uses her camera to find her truth and tell her story.
29. Dread Nation
by Justina Ireland
Get it HERE.
Justina Ireland imagines a zombie apocalypse that coincides with the Civil War. Even though the nation’s fighting is interrupted by literal zombies, racism does not take a break. In this story, young Black women are trained to be attendants, high-class servants who protect white families from the undead. Jane McKeene is training to be an attendant but is really just biding her time to get home to her mother when Black people start disappearing. Jane’s plans are derailed as she aims to find out why.
30. One Crazy Summer
by Rita Williams Garcia
Get it HERE.
Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern travel across the country to spend the summer with their mother who left them seven years ago for a new life in California. They are expecting a summer filled with Disneyland trips, but instead, their mother enrolls them in a summer camp run by the Black Panthers.
31. Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Get it HERE.
A classic that students will absolutely encounter in college if they don’t meet it in high school, Their Eyes Were Watching God follows a strong female protagonist named Janey as she searches for love and a meaningful life against the backdrop of life after emancipation, when Black people were freed but not free.
32. Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Get it HERE.
Kindred is a modern classic. The story follows Dana, a Black woman living in modern times who is abruptly time-travelled back to the south where she spends time in the slave quarters. She has no control over her time travelling and her journeys back to plantation get longer and more dangerous as the novel goes on.
33. The Steep and Thorny Way
by Cat Winters
Get it HERE.
This retelling of Hamlet is set in 1920s Oregon, a time when the KKK is active and malicious. The part of Hamlet is given to Hanalee, a Black woman who watches her father die and friends disappear. To get to the bottom of the mystery of her father’s death, Hanalee tracks down a night “haint” to get some answers.
34. Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Get it HERE.
Cora and Caesar escape together on the Underground Railroad, which in this novel is not a empheral network of houses, faint signs, and whispers. Instead, in this novel the Underground Railroad is quite literal, in which train conductors operate a secret network of underground tracks. The horrors of slavery are foregrounded in this novel as Cora makes her escape.
35. Copper Sun
by Sharon Draper
Get it HERE.
This novel about slavery starts before most – in it, a young girl is stolen from her home in Africa and sold into slavery. The content is brutal, as was the reality of slavery.
36. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party
by M. T. Anderson
Get it HERE.
Octavian Nothing is set just before the Revolutionary War. In it, young Octavian and his mother are subjects in an experiment designed to test whether people of African descent have the capacity to be as intelligent and civilized as White people. Octavian Nothing looks into slavery in the North during the revolution, a perspective few books take.
37. Chains
by Laurie Halse Anderson
Get it HERE.
Chains is the first book in a trilogy that is followed up by Forge and Ashes. This story follows Isabel, a slave during the Revolutionary War. At her own great risk, Isabel spies on her owners for the patriot army.
38. Come Juneteenth
by Ann Rinaldi
Get it HERE.
Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19, the day Gordon Granger read slaves in Texas the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation officially freed slaves on January 1, 1863, but the last remaining slaves in the confederacy didn’t go free until Juneteenth. In this novel, Ann Rinaldi tells the story of Sis Goose, a Texas slave who nonetheless considers her owners family. When Union soldiers show up at her plantation and she discovers that she could have had her freedom two years prior had her “family” been honest with her, she runs away.
39. Hang a Thousand Trees With Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley
by Ann Rinaldi
Get it HERE.
Phillis Wheatley is stolen from her home in Senegal and sold into slavery where she is purchased by a Boston family, where she becomes America’s first published Black poet.
40. Jefferson’s Sons: A Founding Father’s Secret Children
by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Get it HERE.
This book is a meticiously researched but fictionalized look at the life of Thomas Jefferson through the eyes of three of his slaves – two of whom are his own children.
41. 47
by Walter Mosley
Get it HERE.
47 is part historical fiction, part science fiction. Slave number 47 meets Tall John, a runaway slave and alien who encourages 47 to fight for his own liberation.
42. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High
by Melba Pattillo Beales
Get it HERE.
Beales was one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine Black students who enrolled in Central High School immediately following the supreme court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Beales looks unflinchingly at the overt and violent racism the Little Rock Nine encountered.
43. Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March
by Lynda Blackmon Lowery and illustrated by PJ Loughran
Get it HERE.
Author Lynda Blackmon Lowery was the youngest marcher in the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. She was jailed 11 times before she turned 15. This is her powerful memoir about what it means to be a nonviolent protestor in the face of violence.
Nonfiction
44. March Trilogy
by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell
Get it HERE.
The March Trilogy is a series of three graphic novels following the activism of lifelong civil rights activist John Lewis. Lewis today is a Georgia congressman and recipient of the Medal of Freedom, but his life has been defined by his role in the civil rights movement, from 1963’s March on Washington to meeting Martin Luther King to nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins. This memoir trilogy sets Lewis’ personal story alongside the backdrop of the larger civil rights movement.
45. We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide
by Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden
Get it HERE.
This is a young adult adaptation of the book White Rage. This book looks at the history of civil rights victories as well as the roadblocks that have been placed in front of them. It delves deeply into five broad civil rights moments including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the War on Drugs, and the election of President Obama.
46. Hidden Figures The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
by Margot Lee Shetterly
Get it HERE.
A group of brilliant female mathematicians are relegated to teaching in segregated schools until the labor shortage of World War 2 meant they suddenly had a shot at jobs in the aeronautics field. Their jobs help launch rockets into outer space, but even while working for Virginia’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, the women are forced to deal with racist coworkers and segregated working conditions.
47. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
Get it HERE.
Henrietta Lacks, a Black, poor tobacco farmer, has her cells taken from her during a routine medical procedure without her knowledge. These cells, due to their ability to reproduce forever, become a major medical breakthrough, launching a multi-million dollar industry, yet Henrietta’s family has seen no profits from these cells.
48. 12 Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup
Get it HERE.
This is Solomon Northup’s memoir. In it, he tells the story of being born a free man in the north, kidnapped, and forced into slavery, until family in New York are able to discover his whereabouts and secure his release.
49. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriett Tubman
By Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Get it HERE.
This biography is more a tribute to Harriet Tubman than a dry recounting of facts. It paints Tubman as a strong, complex woman. The author includes illustrations, photos, and sidebars to enhance her narrative.
50. To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools
edited by William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale
Get it HERE.
In Mississippi during the summer of 1964, Black students in the south enrolled in Freedom Schools, temporary schools that were part of the greater civil rights movement. The mission of these schools was to help organize Black people in the south to achieve greater equality. This book is a collection of student journalism written in freedom schools. It’s a fantastic primary source and would be ideal in a high school journalism program.
Other book lists from Amy’s bookshelf you’ll love:
- 50 Books About Race For Kids & Young Adults to Read Right Now
- 50 Must-Read Books for Kindergarteners
- 50 Must-Read Books For First Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Second Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books For Third Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Fourth Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books For Fifth Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books For Sixth Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Seventh Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Eighth Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Ninth Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Tenth Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Eleventh Graders
- 50 Must-Read Books for Twelfth Graders
