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Below are more than 60 books we recommend for the classroom and as background reading for parents and teachers on the history of slavery and resistance in the United States. Titles with reviews on this site are noted with an asterisk(*).
Contact us if you have recommended titles to add. We also offer lessons and other resources for teaching about slavery and resistance on our Zinn Education Project website.
Before sharing these books with children, read Considerations for Early Childhood and Early Elementary Educators on Slavery and Resistance.
Also see the Chicago Tribune article "Slavery in children's books: What works?."
Read about the librarians, #BlackLivesMatter activists, journalists, authors, and others who launched a grassroots protest against a stereotypical children's book about slavery. (Find a compilation of articles about the protest at American Indians in Children's Literature.)
See more recommended titles on these lists: Civil Rights Teaching, Black History, Reconstruction
Circle Unbroken: A Story of a Basket and Its People
By Margot Theis Raven, E. B. Lewis (Illustrator)
Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad
By Ellen Levine, Kadir Nelson (Illustrator)
The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery
By Dennis Brindell Fradin, Judith Bloom Fradin, Eric Velasquez (Illustrator)
So Tall Within: Sojourner Truth's Long Walk Toward Freedom
By Gary Schmidt, Daniel Mintor (Illustrator)
The Clothesline Code: The Story of Civil War Spies Lucy Ann and Dabney Walker
By Janet Halfmann and Trisha Mason (Illustrator)
Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship & Freedom
By Tim Tingle, Jeanne Rorex Bridges (Illustrator)
Fort Mose: And the Story of the Man Who Built the First Free Black Settlement in Colonial America
By Glennette Tilley Turner
Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their lives and Dreams Brought to Life*
By Ashley Bryan, Ashley Bryan (Illustrator)
Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters
By Andrea Davis Pinkney, Stephen Alcorn, Stephen Alcorn (Illustrator)
Only Passing Through: The Story of Sojourner Truth
By Anne Rockwell, R. Gregory Gregory Christie (Illustrator)
Elijah of Buxton
By Christopher Paul Curtis
Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: Young Readers Edition*
By Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Kathleen Van Cleve
Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War
Edited by: Ira Berlin Barbara J. Fields Steven F. Miller Joseph P. Reidy Leslie S. Rowland
Growing Up in Slavery: Stories of Young Slaves as Told by Themselves
By Yuval Taylor (Editor), Kathleen Judge (Illustrator)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself
By Frederick Douglass, Angela Y. Davis
The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano
By Margarita Engle, Sean Qualls (Illustrator)
Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
By Ira Berlin (Editor), Marc Favreau (Editor), Steven F. Miller (Editor)
Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
By Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities
By Craig Steven Wilder
Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry Into the Civil War and Reconstruction
Teaching Guide. By American Social History Project with foreword by Eric Foner. 1996.
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans
By John Hope Franklin, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations
By Mary Frances Berry
