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Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad
Ellen Levine · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorSomeone Knows My Name
Lawrence Hill · 499 pages
Dreaming of escaping her life of slavery in South Carolina and returning to her African home, slave Aminata Diallo is thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War, during which she helps create a list of black people who have been honored for their service to the king.
Cane River
Lalita Tademy · 418 pages
The "New York Times" bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick--the unique and deeply moving epic of four generations of African-American women based on one family's ancestral past.
The House Girl
Tara Conklin · 372 pages
A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.
Chains
Laurie Halse Anderson · 326 pages
If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl? As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth a
Jefferson's Sons
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley · 400 pages
A fictionalized look at the last twenty years of Thomas Jefferson's life at Monticello through the eyes of three of his slaves, two of whom were his sons by his slave, Sally Hemings.
The Pox Party
M.T. Anderson · 368 pages
Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, from birth to age sixteen, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.
Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad
Henry Cole · 40 pages
In this wordless picture book, a young Southern farm girl discovers a runaway slave hiding behind the corn crib in the barn and decides to help him.
Underground: Finding the Light to Freedom
Shane W. Evans
The Kitchen House
Kathleen Grissom · 368 pages
"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead · 416 pages
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a youn
Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky
Faith Ringgold · 32 pages
With Harriet Tubman as her guide, Cassie retraces the steps escaping slaves took on the Underground Railroad in order to reunite with her younger brother.
The Known World
Edward P. Jones · 400 pages
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for *Paradise Lost* and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin · 916 pages
Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president. On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the R
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages
An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass · 126 pages
This book is an autobiographical account by runaway slave Frederick Douglass that chronicles his experiences with his owners and overseers and discusses how slavery affected both slaves and slaveholders.
Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave
Laban Carrick Hill · 40 pages
Chronicles the life of Dave, a nineteenth-century slave who went on to become an influential poet, artist, and potter.
Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup · 228 pages
Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
Yellow Crocus
Laila Ibrahim · 243 pages
"Moments after Lisbeth is born, she's taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed m
Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton
Don Tate · 37 pages
In the nineteenth century, North Carolina slave George Moses Horton taught himself to read and earned money to purchase his time, although not his freedom. Horton became the first African American to be published in the South, protesting slavery in the form of verse.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Alex Haley · 704 pages
Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural se
Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt
Deborah Hopkinson · 40 pages
A young slave stitches a quilt with a map pattern which guides her to freedom in the North.
Elijah of Buxton
Christopher Paul Curtis · 341 pages
Elijah has to go find this former slave that stole a friends money who was planning on buying his family back out of slavery. What happens along the way is terrifying to even think about, friends getting shot, dying, and freeing slaves.