Suggested Books

This book brings to light the often-suppressed stories of those who risked everything to end enslavement. Profiling 20 Black and white men and women, the book highlights their courage, activism, and unwavering commitment to freedom. Through vivid vignettes, including their own words, their struggles and sacrifices come to life.

Tom Weiner is a Northampton-based writer, educator, and anti-racism activist. Dr. Amilcar Shabazz is a professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research.

The texts, images, and other materials come primarily from the premier Southern collections in the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These original Southern materials can be found in several library locations, including the Southern Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern manuscripts in the country; the North Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a single state anywhere; the Rare Book Collection, which holds an extensive Southern pamphlet collection; and Davis Library, which offers rich holdings of printed materials on the Southeast.

Author: Johnathan Daniel Wells
The Kidnapping Club is a powerful and resonant account of the ties between the institution of enslavement and capitalism, corrupt roots of policing in America, and the unflagging strength of Black activism. Dr. Wells’ gripping narrative tells the story of the powerful men who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well in New York City long after the institution of enslavement had been outlawed in the North.

Author: Alice L. Baumgartner
The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American enslaved before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped enslavement not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where the institution of enslavement was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished the institution of enslavement and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States.

Author: Stanley Harrold
While many scholars have examined the slavery disputes in the halls of Congress, Subversives is the first history of practical abolitionism in the streets, homes, and places of business of the nation’s capital. Historian Stanley Harrold looks beyond resolutions, platforms, and debates to describe how African Americans – both free and enslaved – and whites allies engaged in a dangerous day-to-day campaign to drive the peculiar institution out of Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake region.

Author: J.W.C. Pennington

Pennington’s narrative portrays his life as both a physical and spiritual progression. His treatment of both movements—from slavery to freedom and ignorance to wisdom—condemns the chattels principle and stresses the urgency of education.

Author: Harriet Jacobs

The true story of an individual’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girlremains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to liberty and reunion with her children in the North.

Author: Richard Rothstein

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de juresegregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Author: Douglas A Blackmon 

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

Author: Fergus Bordewich

Bound for Canaan tells the stories of men and women like David Ruggles, who invented the black underground in New York City; bold Quakers like Isaac Hopper and Levi Coffin, who risked their lives to build the Underground Railroad; and the inimitable Harriet Tubman. Interweaving thrilling personal stories with the politics of slavery and abolition, Bound for Canaan shows how the Underground Railroad gave birth to this country’s first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for social change.