It's Sunday 4:23 AM — The Library is currently closed
“Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.” —Juneteenth.com
Learn more about Juneteenth with these titles for children and adults.
by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven Miller
Nonfiction
Early in the 1930s interviewers from the Federal Writers’ Project combed the American South in search of former slaves. The interviewers spoke with hundreds of elderly people about their experiences in slavery, and preserved the voices of some of them on primitive recording devices. The nearly-inaudible recordings were placed in the Library of Congress, unheard by the general public, but now, remastered with the aid of modern technology, they offer the only known opportunity to hear the voices of former slaves.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
by Kelly Starling Lyons
Fiction
Honoring a special broom for its representation of the slave heritage that forbade legal marriages, Ellen prepares for her parents’ registry at a Reconstruction-era courthouse and repeats a cultural wedding tradition. (picture book)
Book: BCCLS
by Ralph Ellison
Fiction
Shot on the Senate floor by a young Black man, a dying racist senator summons an elderly Black Baptist minister from Oklahoma to his side for a remarkable dialogue that reveals the deeply buried secrets of their shared past and the tragedy that reunites them.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
Audiobook: Libby/OverDrive
by Carole Boston Weatherford
Fiction
Cassandra and her family have moved to her parents’ hometown in Texas, but it doesn’t feel like home to Cassandra until she experiences Juneteenth. (picture book)
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Justina Ireland
Fiction
When families go missing in Baltimore County, Jane McKeene, who is studying to become an Attendant, finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that has her fighting for her life against powerful enemies.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
Audiobook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
by Kenneth C. Davis
Nonfiction
Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were “owned” by four U.S. presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role slavery played in the founding of America.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
Audiobook: Libby/OverDrive
by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi
Nonfiction
A history of racist and antiracist ideas in America, from their roots in Europe until today, adapted from the National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
Audiobook: Libby/OverDrive
by Tonya Bolden
Nonfiction
A unique look at the events that led to the Emancipation Proclamation. Filled with little-known facts and fascinating details. (chapter book)
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Dionne Ford, Jill Strauss
Nonfiction
Slavery’s Descendants brings together twenty-five contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, to tell their personal stories of exhuming and exorcising America’s racist past. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery and reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time.
Book: BCCLS
by Justina Ireland
Fiction
A sequel to the best-selling Dread Nation finds a devastating loss throwing everything Jane believes into question, before encounters with familiar faces in Summerland enmeshes her in a maelstrom of deception and private demons.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
Audiobook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
by Floyd Cooper
Fiction
Little Mazie wants the freedom to stay up late, but her father explains what freedom really means in the story of Juneteenth, and how her ancestors celebrated their true freedom. (picture book)
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
by Edward L. Ayers
Nonfiction
North of the Mason-Dixon line, in the Pennsylvania portion of the valley, free black families sent husbands and sons to fight with the U.S. Colored Troops. In letters home, even as Lincoln commemorated the dead at Gettysburg, they spoke movingly of a war for emancipation. As defeat and the end of slavery descended on Virginia, with the political drama of Reconstruction unfolding in Washington, the crowded classrooms of the Freedmen’s Bureau schools spoke of a new society struggling to emerge.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Walter Dean Myers
Nonfiction
A picture book biography about the life of Frederick Douglass. (picture book)
Book: BCCLS
by Douglas R. Egerton
Nonfiction
Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance.
Book: BCCLS
by Jim Haskins
Nonfiction
A historical account of the role of African-American soldiers in the Civil War. (chapter book)
Book: BCCLS
by Zora Neale Hurston
Nonfiction
Zora Neale Hurston interviewed the last surviving African to be kidnapped, shipped to the U.S. and enslaved, a few years before the start of the Civil War (long after such practices were illegal). Meticulously she records his story from his own point of view, from his boyhood in Africa up until Reconstruction.
Book: BCCLS
Audiobook: Libby/OverDrive
by David W. Blight
Nonfiction
Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five post-Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group with the publication of A Slave No More, a major new addition to the canon of American history.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Denise Lewis Patrick
Fiction
A series of vignettes reveal life in the Deep South for African Americans as they experience discrimination in a doctor’s office, lynching, and other forms of oppression, especially during the 1960s.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive, hoopla
by Tanya Bolden
Fiction
Freed from slavery, Mariah and her young brother Zeke join Sherman’s march, where Mariah meets Caleb and dares to imagine the possibility of true love, but hope can come at a cost.
Book: BCCLS
by Angela Johnson
Fiction
In 1865, members of a family start their day as slaves, working in a Texas cotton field, and end it celebrating their freedom on what came to be known as Juneteenth. (picture book)
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by W.E.B. DuBois
Nonfiction
After four centuries of bondage, the nineteenth century marked the long-awaited release of millions of black slaves. Subsequently, these former slaves attempted to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectual leaders in United States history, evaluates the twenty years of fateful history that followed the Civil War, with special reference to the efforts and experiences of African Americans.
Book: BCCLS
by David Brion Davis
Nonfiction
From the revered historian, the long-awaited conclusion of the magisterial history of slavery and emancipation in Western culture that has been nearly fifty years in the making.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Shannon Gibney
Fiction
A tale spanning two centuries and two continents recounts the stories of five generations of young people caught in a spiral of death and exile between Liberia and the United States.
Book: BCCLS
by Patricia C. and Fredrick L. McKissack
Nonfiction
Uses slave narratives, letters, diaries, military orders, and other documents to chronicle the various stages leading to the emancipation of slaves in the United States. (chapter book)
Book: BCCLS
by Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden
Nonfiction
From the end of the Civil War to the tumultuous issues in America today, an acclaimed historian reframes the conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.
Book: BCCLS
eBook: Libby/OverDrive
by Amanda Jackson Green
Nonfiction
From Juneteenth to the Tulsa Race Massacre, many important moments in Black American history have not been taught or discussed. Discover these events and how they are remembered in the Black community today. (chapter book)
Book: BCCLS
