My favorite books on the long and difficult fight against slavery in America

This book does a fantastic job of illustrating something that I explore in my own work: pro-slavery (and anti-Black) white Americans were not the only obstacles facing abolitionists in the fight for racial equality.

The abolitionist movement itself was often divided along racial lines. Black abolitionists pushed for radical, egalitarian change in all aspects of American life. When push came to shove, however, many of their white counterparts had a limit as to how far they would go.

Bell shows how this dynamic played out at progressive colleges like Oberlin before, during, and after the Civil War. The implications of this book, however, stretch far beyond those campuses–and far beyond that time.

With this book, Annette Gordon-Reed changed how historians understood the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved servant, Sally Hemings.

In conclusively persuasive terms, Gordon-Reed proves not only that the third president was the father of Hemings' children, but also that Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's own deceased wife. She also deftly shows us how to understand these truths–to grasp the supremely unbalanced power dynamic between Jefferson and Hemings, while at the same time appreciating Hemings' agency in navigating between the limited options available to her as an enslaved woman.

This book is an earth-shattering work of history conveyed in beautiful prose. 

Newman's work opened my eyes to a remarkable man I had previously known little about: Bishop Richard Allen, the founder and leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Born into slavery, Allen freed himself and dedicated his life to a singular cause: providing enslaved African Americans a safe space where they would be treated as dignified human beings rather than property. His AME Church changed the course of African American history.

Newman demonstrates how Allen was also a forceful abolitionist whose invocations of patriotism to win over white Americans proved a lasting influence on the cause. Quite simply, it is a wonderful biography.

This book demonstrates a point that I always try to make to students: the antislavery movement was much more than mass meetings and heroic escapes along the Underground Railroad.

It was far more complex–and, at times, far more violent. Many Black activists in the years before the Civil War turned to the tactics of violence to try and shake a complacent nation into action. They did so in desperation, and only with much anguish–and much controversy.

Jackson's book gets deep into the weeds of how the struggle for antislavery progress actually worked. 

Reidy's book is an elegant and engaging read, but it is not an easy one.

It illustrates how the process of emancipation actually played out on the ground after Abraham Lincoln issued his famed Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It takes us away from the marble edifices of Civil War Washington and into the dirt, showing us how messy the process of implementing freedom truly was.

It does so, moreover, by centering our attention on the actual men and women fighting for their own freedom. Reidy offers us historians a seminal reminder: change is not made solely from on high.