Fiction
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Multiple voices illuminate a household in the unsettled world of seventeenth-century colonial America.
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12 books
Oral history
Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston records Cudjo Lewis’s account of captivity, the Atlantic crossing, and life in Africatown.
Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A mother and daughter reckon with the afterlife of slavery in a house haunted by a child’s return.
Poetry
Buffalo Dance
Frank X Walker
A sequence of poems imagines the perspective of York, the enslaved participant in the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Fiction
Clotel
William Wells Brown
Brown’s novel follows women navigating slavery and family separation in the early United States.
History
How the Word Is Passed
Clint Smith
Visits to historic sites and memorials ask how public institutions tell the story of American slavery.
Memoir
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs
Jacobs recounts exploitation, years spent in hiding, and her efforts to secure freedom for her children.
Speculative fiction
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
A Black writer is repeatedly pulled from twentieth-century California to a Maryland plantation.
Memoir
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Douglass describes enslavement, his pursuit of literacy, and his emergence as an abolitionist.
Memoir
Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
William Wells Brown
Brown describes enslavement and escape, illuminating a life that began near Lexington and led into abolitionism.
History
The 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Essays, poems, and fiction explore slavery’s place in American institutions and historical memory.
History
The Half Has Never Been Told
Edward E. Baptist
A study of slavery’s expansion and the role coerced labor played in American economic growth.