Slavery, Escape and Freedom

Tim Tingle (A) and Jeanne Rorex Bridges (ILT)

List Price: $12.95 (Paperback – Choctaw / African American / Friendship and Escape – 2008)

When it was first published, Crossing Bok Chitto took readers by surprise. This moving and original story about the intersection of Native and African Americans received starred reviews and many…

Doreen Rappaport (A) and Charles Lilly (ILT)

List Price: $7.99 (Paperback – Slavery / Escape / Underground Railroad – 1998)

Eliza and her baby, running across the ice. Selena and Cornelia Jackson, masquerading as boys. Henry Box Brown, shipping himself north in a wooden crate. Jane Johnson, risking everything to testify against…

Doreen Rappaport (A) Shane Evans (ILT)

List Price: $9.99 (Paperback – History / Slave Resistance – 2005)

Ever since the first boatload of human cargo sailed to the New World, African Americans have waged a courageous struggle for dignity and freedom from slavery. Using true accounts, author Doreen Rappaport puts readers…

George Gershwin (A) and Mike Wimmer (ILT)

List Price: $8.99 (Paperback / Plantation Life – 2002)

This lavish picture book is based on the beloved folk opera Porgy and Bess features Wimmer lush, epic oil paintings which reveal a vision of plantation life that extends the lyrics of this enormously popular…

Tom Feelings (A) and Julius Lester (ILT)

List Price: $8.99 (Paperback – History / Slave Narratives – 2005)

What was it like to be a slave? Listen to the words and learn about the lives of countless slaves and ex-slaves, telling about their forced journey from Africa to the United States, their…

Deborah Hopkinson (A) and James E. Ransome (ILT)

List Price: $7.99 (Paperback – Historical / Underground Railroad – 2004)

Under the quilt of night a young slave girl leads her loved ones away from the slave master who worked them: hoeing and picking, / mending and sewing, / till…

Zona Zeldis McDonough (A) and Nancy Harrison (ILT)

List Price: $6.99 (Paperback – Biography / Conductor / Underground Railroad – 2002)

Born a slave in Maryland, Harriet Tubman knew first-hand what it meant to be someone’s property; she was whipped by owners and almost killed by an overseer. It was from other field…

Sherley Anne Williams (A) and Carole Byard (ILT)

List Price: $7.99 (Paperback – African American History / Migrant Farm Workers / Cotton – 1992)

This child’s view of the long days work in the cotton fields, simply expressed in a poet’s resonant language, is a fresh…

Nancy I. Sanders (A) and E. B. Lewis (ILT)

List Price: $17.99 (Hardcover – Alphabet / African American Experience – 2009)

The tapestry of American history is made up of countless threads marking the contributions of people from many different backgrounds and cultures. D is…

Ntozake Shange (A) and Rod Brown (ILT)

List Price: $16.99 (Hardcover – History / Slavery / Underground Railroad / Freedom Stories – 2012)

Award-winning poet Ntozake Shange and artist Rod Brown reimagine the journeys of the brave men and women who made their way to freedom on the Underground Railroad.
Fleeing on the…

Ellen Levin (A) and Kadir Nelson (ILT)

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – African American History /Escape to Freedom – 2007)

A stirring, dramatic story of a slave who mails himself to freedom by a Jane Addams Peace Award-winning author and a Coretta Scott King Award-winning artist.

Henry Brown doesn’t know how old he…

Kadir Nelson (A and ILT)

List Price: $10.99 (Paperback – African American History / Colonial Days to Civil Rights Movement – 2011)

Kadir Nelson’s Heart and Soul—the winner of numerous awards, including the 2012 Coretta Scott King Author Award and Illustrator Honor, and the recipient of five starred reviews—now features eight pages of discussion…

Carole Boston Weatherford (A) and Kadir Nelson (ILT)

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – African American History / Leader / Spiritual / Bravery – 2006)

A CALDECOTT HONOR BOOK

 “I set the North Star in the heavens and I mean for you to be free.”

Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman hears these words from…

Anne Rockwell (A) and R. Gregory Christie (ILT)

List Price: $8.99 (Paperback – Biography / African American Hisotry / Abolitionist / Women Rights – 2002)

Powerful picture book biography of one of the abolitionist movement most compelling voices.

Sojourner Truth traveled the country…

Jacqueline Woodson (A) Hudson Talbott (ILT)

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – Family History / Slavery to Freedom – 2005)

Soonies great-grandma was just seven years old when she was sold to a big plantation without her ma and pa, and with only some fabric and needles to call her own. She…

Andrea Davis Pinkney (A) and Brian Pinkney (ILT)

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – Biography / African American Leader / Abolitionist and Feminist – 2009)

A dynamic portrait of the freed slave whose physical and spiritual strength made her one of America most powerful abolitionist voices.

Synopsis:She was big. She was black. She was…

Ntoshake Shange (A) and Rod Brown (ILT)

List Price: $16.99 (Hardcover – African History / Slavery to Jim Crow – 2009)

Jim Crow; Brown v. Board of Education; Bull Connor; KKK; Birmingham; the Lorraine Motel; Rosa; Martin; and Malcolm.

From slavery to the separation of colored and white and from horrifying oppression to…

Yona Zeldis McDonough (A), Lauren Mortimer (ILT) and James Bennet (ILT)

List Price: $5.99 (Paperback – Underground Railroad / Escape 2013)

No one knows where the term Underground Railroad came from–there were no trains or tracks, only “conductors” who helped escaping slaves to freedom. Including real stories about “passengers” on the “Railroad,” this…

Ann Turner (A) and James Ransome (ILT)

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – Biography / Abolitionist / Women’s Rights Activist / Evangelists – 2015)

Here is the remarkable true story of how former slave Isabella Baumfree transformed herself into the preacher and orator Sojourner Truth, as told by acclaimed author Ann Turner and award-winning…

Charles Johnson (A)

List Price: $17.00 (Paperback – African American History / Middle Passage / Slave Trade – 1998)

A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Charles Johnson’s National Book Award-winning masterpiece of a novel in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby-Dick heroic in proportion to fiction that hooks the mind” (The New York…

Lisa Cline Ransome (A) and James E. Ransome (ILT)

List Price: $19.99 (Hardcover – Biography / Leader / Abolitionist / Orator – 2012)

The inspirational, true story of how Frederick Douglass found his way to freedom one word at a time.

This picture book biography chronicles the youth of Frederick Douglass, one of…

April Jones Prince (A) and Robert Squier (ILT)

List Price: $5.99 (Paperback – Biography / Abolitionist / Orator – 2014)

Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, Frederick Douglass was determined to gain freedom–and once he realized that knowledge was power, he secretly learned to read and write to give himself an advantage.…

Dolores Johnson (A) and (ILT)

List Price: $7.99 (Paperback – African Family / Enslaved – 2019)

A young girl describes how she once heard the sound of warning drums in Africa signaling the coming of horror. Kidnapped, made to march while chained, and taken to America to be sold at an auction, she…

Carole Boston Weatherford (A) and R. Gregory Christie (ILT)  

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – African American History / New Orleans / Congo Square – 2016)

This poetic, nonfiction story about a little-known piece of African American history captures a human’s capacity to find hope and joy in difficult circumstances and demonstrates how…

Sharon Gayle (A) and Felicia Marshall (ILT) 

List Price $1.89 (Paperback – Biography / Leader / Slave Era – 2003)

Harriet Tubman was born a slave. But she always knew that someday she would be free. After realizing her dream Harriet decided she had to help others find freedom too. So she became…

Patricia Lakin (A) and Valerio Fabbretti (ILT) 

List Price: $16.99 (Hardcover – Heroes Of Civil War – 2017)

Get to know heroes of the Civil War in this fact-tastic, nonfiction Level 3 Ready-to-Read, part of a new series about the secrets of American History!

Secrets of American History is an action-packed nonfiction Level…

Ashley Bryan (A and ILT)

List Price: $17.99 (Hardcover – The Lives of 11 African American Slaves – 2016) 

Newbery Honor Book
Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book

Using original slave auction and plantation estate documents, Ashley Bryan offers a moving and powerful picture book that contrasts…

James Ransome (A and ILT) 

List Price: $17.99 (Hardcover – Siblings Escape to Freedom – 2019)

A young slave girl witnesses the heartbreak and hopefulness of her family and their plantation community when her brother escapes for freedom in this brilliantly conceived picture book by Coretta Scott King Award winner James E. Ransome.

…

Charles R. Smith Jr. (A) and Shane W. Evans (ILT)

List Price: $20.99 (Hardcover – History / 28 Important Days In History – 2015) 

Each day features a different influential figure in African-American history, from Crispus Attucks, the first man shot in the Boston Massacre, sparking the Revolutionary War, to Madame C. J. Walker, who…

Gary D. Schmidt (A) and Daniel Minter (ILT) 

List Price: $18.99 (Hardcover – Abolitionist/ Feminists / Leader – 2018)

From celebrated author Gary D. Schmidt comes a picture book biography of a giant in the struggle for civil rights, perfectly pitched for readers today.

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery but possessed a mind and…

Sarah Fabiny (A) Who HQ (A) and Ted Hammond (ILT)

 List Price: $6.99 (Paperback – Journalist / Activist- Exposed Lynching -2020) 

The story of how a girl born into slavery became an early leader in the civil rights movement and the most famous black female journalist in nineteenth-century America.

Born into slavery in 1862, Ida…

Tonya Bolden (A) 

List Price: $10.99 (Paperback – Young Girl Seeking A Better Life – 2020)

As a young black woman in 1880s Savannah, Essie’s dreams are very much at odds with her reality. Ashamed of her beginnings, but unwilling to accept the path currently available to her, Essie is trapped between…

Velma Maia Thomas (A)

List Price: $40.00  (Hardcover – Interactive / African American History Book –  2019)

This collectible book by distinguished public historian Velma Maia Thomas offers an intimate look at black history in America with exclusive accounts, photographs, and interactive and removable artifacts.

Presented in three parts—Lest…

Kyle Baker ( A and ILT)  

List Price: $18.95 (Paperback – Graphic Novel – Nat Turner Story – 2008)

The fascinating and action-packed true story of an American freedom fighter, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker as a graphic novel—collecting all four issues of his critically acclaimed miniseries.

The story…

Carole Boston Weatherford (A) and Floyd Cooper (ILT) 

List Price: $17.99 (Hardcover – 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and Massacre – 2021)

Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation’s history. The book traces the…

Arlisha Norwood (A)

List Price: $14.99 (Paperback – Black Leaders In History  – 2020)

Meet extraordinary black heroes throughout history―biographies for kids ages 8 to 12

You’re invited to meet ancient Egyptian rulers, brilliant scientists, legendary musicians, and civil rights activists―all in the same book! Black Heroes introduces you to 51 black…

Kirsti Jewel, Who Hq (A) and Manuel Gutierrez (ILT)

List Price: $7.99 (Paperback – Juneteenth (What Was Series) – 2022)

Discover more about Juneteenth, the important holiday that celebrates the end of chattel slavery in the United States.

On June 19, 1865, a group of enslaved men, women, and children in…

Some call it Freedom Day; some call it Emancipation Day; some call it Juneteenth. Learn more about this important African American holiday.

Before the Ships is a powerful and poetic celebration of the early roots of Black history. The great achievements and accomplishments across Africa prior to the Transatlantic slave trade are told through melodious text and evocative illustrations, that culminate into the strength and resilience of modern-day Black people.

For so many of us,…