As Juneteenth approaches, it’s a meaningful time to honor and reflect on the resilience, culture, and contributions of African Americans throughout history. Celebrated on June 19, Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. It stands as a powerful reminder of delayed justice, the ongoing struggle for equality, and the enduring strength of Black communities. Libraries play a vital role in preserving these stories and making them accessible to everyone. To commemorate this important holiday, we’ve curated a list of powerful books that illuminate the legacy of emancipation, celebrate Black voices, and inspire continued learning and dialogue.
To commemorate this important holiday, we’ve curated a list of powerful books that illuminate the legacy of emancipation, celebrate Black voices, and inspire continued learning and dialogue.
These titles offer a rich and rewarding way to engage with the spirit of Juneteenth.
African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals by David Hackett Fischer
A brilliant synthesis of African and African-American history that shows how slavery differed in different regions of the country, and how the Africans and their descendants influenced the culture, commerce, and laws of the early United States.
Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor
An epic story, Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution. In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the US from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive.
American Inheritance : Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795 by Edward J. Larson
Larson recasts the narrative of the nation’s founding by focusing on vociferous debates about liberty that erupted during three crucial decades of revolutionary fervor. By 1700, more than 2 million enslaved Africans had been shipped to America. At a time when rebellious colonists proclaimed their refusal to be enslaved by the British, most saw no contradiction in buying and selling men, women, and children. Many, especially in the South, agreed with Thomas Jefferson that Blacks were inferior, “incapable of liberty on a par with whites.” Larson’s stirring narrative includes the perspectives of free and escaped slaves, such as James Somerset, who was brought to England by his owner, where he successfully sued for his freedom; poet Phillis Wheatley; and Ona Judge, dower property of Martha Washington, whose escape incited George Washington’s desperate, enraged search for her return.
Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra
The 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which every aspect of life in the United States was and is shaped by the existence of slavery. This book focuses on emancipation and how this opportunity to make right further codified the racial caste system–instead of obliterating it. Manjapra identifies five types of emancipation–explaining them in chronological order–along with the lasting impact these transitions had on formerly enslaved groups around the Atlantic.
The Creole Rebellion : The Most Successful Slave Revolt in American History by Bruce Chadwick
The Creole Rebellion tells the suspenseful story of a successful mutiny on board the slave ship Creole. En route for a New Orleans slave-auction block in November 1841, nineteen captives mutinied, killing one man and injuring several others. After taking control of the vessel, mutineer Madison Washington forced the crewmen to sail to the Bahamas. Despite much local hysteria upon their arrival, all of the 135 slaves aboard the ship won their freedom there.The revolt significantly fueled and amplified the slave debate within a divided nation that was already hurtling toward a Civil War.
The Devil’s Half Acre : The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green
Green draws on years of deep research to tell the extraordinary hidden story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who sought freedom and lit a path for liberation for thousands more. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre.” When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre,” a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams. It still exists today as Virginia Union University, one of America’s first Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
The Emancipation Proclamation and Other Documents of Freedom by Abraham Lincoln
This distinguished edition captures a pivotal moment of justice in the United States with a document that paved the way for the abolition of slavery.
General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind “Juneteenth” by Robert C. Conner
The first full-length biography of the Union general who performed heroically at the Civil War battles of Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Mobile. By coming to the aid of Maj. Gen. Thomas—against orders—at the Battle of Chickamauga, Union Gen. Gordon Granger saved the Federal army from catastrophic defeat. Later, he played major roles in the Chattanooga and Mobile campaigns. Immediately after the war, as commander of US troops in Texas, his actions sparked the “Juneteenth” celebrations of slavery’s end, which continue to this day.
A Madman’s Will : John Randolph, 400 Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom by Gregory May
Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which–almost inexplicably–freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves–and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them.
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.
On Freedom Road : Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad by David M. Goodrich
Over the course of four years, Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened. This book enables us to see familiar places–New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo–in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery.
Hell Put to Shame : The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery by Earl Swift
On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War. Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that it placed before a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.
Last Seen : The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find their Lost Families by Judith Ann Giesberg
Drawing from an archive of nearly five thousand letters and advertisements, the riveting, dramatic story of formerly enslaved people who spent years searching for family members stolen away during slavery.
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, this book provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
A Question of Freedom : the Families Who Challenged Slavery From the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas
The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history, in which a number of enslaved families challenged their bondage in court.
This book highlights The Slave Narratives–condensing tens of thousands of pages into short excerpts from about 100 former slaves and pairs their accounts with their photographs, taken by the workers sent to record their stories. The book documents what slaves saw and remembered, and explains how they lived. It is an eye-opening account that details what it was like to be a slave–from everyday life to the overwhelming fear they harbored for their lives and for the lives of their family and loved ones. Their stories are clear and stirring.
Running from Bondage : Enslaved Women and their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America by Karen Cook Bell
tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, who comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell’s enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.
Slavery After Slavery : Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present by Mary Frances Berry
An acclaimed historian narrates the stories of newly emancipated children who were re-enslaved by white masters through apprenticeships and their parents fights to free them. While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, white southerners established a system of apprenticeship after the Civil War that entrapped Black children and their families, leading to undue hardships for generations to come. Berry traces the stories behind individual cases from southern supreme courts to demonstrate how formerly enslaved families and their descendants were systemically injured through white supremacist practices, perpetuated by the legal system. By filling in the family trees of formerly enslaved people to their descendants, Berry documents the intergenerational harm they experienced. The resulting damage of trafficking Black children through apprenticeship laws has been a largely overlooked source of inequality, yet these cases provide specific examples of the kind of economic and physical harm Black families have endured.
The Stolen Wealth of Slavery : A Case for Reparations by David Montero
It has long been maintained by many that the North wasn’t complicit in the horrors of slavery, that the forced bondage and exploitation of Black people was primarily a Southern phenomenon. Yet this isn’t true: In fact, popular Northern banks–including well-known institutions like Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of America–saw their fortunes rise dramatically from their involvement in the slave trade. White business leaders and their surrounding communities created humongous wealth from the abject misery of others. And some of the very Northerners who would be considered pro-Union during the Civil War were in fact anti-abolition, seeing the institution of slavery as being in their best financial interests and only supporting the Union once they realized doing so would be good for business. Over time, the wealth generated from slavery didn’t vanish but became part of the bedrock of the growth of modern corporations, helping to transform America into a global economic behemoth.
The Survivors of the Clotilda:the Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade by Hannah Durkin
In this epic work, Dr. Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The book follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.
The 272 : The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns
Swarns outlines a methodical timeline for the events leading up to the unconscionable sale of 272 innocent men, women, and children. In Maryland, 1838, the first Jesuit province in the U.S. was charged with securing much-needed funding for its most prestigious school, Georgetown University. At the time, Jesuit priests reportedly owned various tobacco, corn, or wheat plantations across the state of Maryland, encompassing thousands of acres and hundreds of enslaved people. Under orders from Rome, it was decided that the best option for saving the university from bankruptcy was to sell 272 enslaved laborers literally down the river to “good plantations” in Louisiana. There, they were subjected to the bullwhip and one of the cruelest forced-labor systems in human history—all to fund Georgetown University.
To Walk About in Freedom : The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner by Carole Emberton
Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858. Her life story, which she recounted in an oral history decades later, captures the complexity of emancipation. Based on interviews that Joyner and formerly enslaved people had with the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, historian Emberton draws a portrait of the steps they took in order to feel free, something no legal mandate could instill. Joyner’s life exemplifies the deeply personal, highly emotional nature of freedom and the decisions people made, from the seemingly mundane.
The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots : A True Story of Slavery : A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography by John S. Jacobs
Narratives written by enslaved Africans in America are few in number. Some are transformative, like that of Harriet Jacobs; others are lesser, like the brief one attributed to Harriet’s brother, John S. Jacobs. The revelation, here, of a much longer, richer, and more radical version of John’s story, is a major historical event. His work is all the more significant for having been written and published in Australia, outside the sanitizing and bowdlerizing influence of the American Abolitionist movement. Jacobs’s full account is a startling and clear expression of the true thoughts, words, and wide-ranging experiences of a man once enslaved.
—Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian