The best books about slavery in the United States

This novel is a fever dream of the best kind. The Prophets is unapologetically about love, how rare and revolutionary it is. How selfish, envious others can see it as a threat—especially when that love is between two enslaved Black men. As powerful as Isaiah and Samuel’s story is, the chapters set in Africa held me equally entranced. As I read, I kept shouting “Yes!” in my head. I felt like I’d been waiting for this book for years. I don’t reread novels often, but this is one to savor.

From her shocking first sentence to her final transcendent words, the narrator compelled me to travel with her through her memories of a lifetime on what might well be her last afternoon. In fact, I read the book in a single day, a unique experience for me since I am a slow reader who hears every word and pictures every action in my mind. Drawn to both reading and writing with a Southern Gothic sensibility, I was spellbound by the unfolding tale of a complex and courageous woman’s survival during the era of the American Civil War. This novel reads like a mesmerizing dramatic monologue delivered on the stage of history.

An invaluable scholarly source for understanding the Atlantic slave system at its source.  Among the book’s virtues are details of the cultures and politics in the area of European penetration and African slavery itself and the African participation in the European trade. This book should be recognized with the extensive literature on the Atlantic slave trade for its acknowledgment of the great range of African languages and cultures that ended up in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.

We may think we know about colonial America. Higginbotham reveals that we are just beginning to learn about this geographical space and this period of history. Higginbotham shows another ‘America,’ still dominated by the laws of European countries such as Britain, France, the Dutch Republics, and Spain. This is an America that may be unfamiliar to us and it is a place where Africans could still negotiate their status in the courts of law. This book offers a very detailed exploration of a fascinating moment in American history. And shows us what the founding of the United States of America really meant to the Africans, who had already been there for more than a hundred years. 

After interviewing me for my new book in May 2021, the editor of a suburban newspaper in Chicago asked me to write an Op Ed piece about the new federal holiday, Juneteenth. It is the day of recognition and celebration of the ending of slavery in the last confederate state of Texas in 1865. My Op Ed piece titled, “My Bittersweet Feelings About Juneteenth,” was written to inform and educate adult readers about June 19, 1865. That was the day Union Troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and began informing Black enslaved people that they were officially emancipated. 

The Juneteenth Story is a well-researched and beautifully written historical depiction of the same event. But the targeted audience of readers are children. It is the size of a large typical children’s coloring book filled with pretty colors and appealing graphic art. My 40-year-old daughter, Akilah, gave it to me as a Father’s… show more.

Gwendolyn Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana is still a foundational text when it comes to studying African people in the colonial lower Mississippi Valley. Her deep knowledge of the archives and skill in bringing the stories of enslaved Africans to live make this a wonderfully informative book. She draws deep connections between the places that Africans left and their forced new homes in Louisiana, while placing a special emphasis on how that culture turned into an African creole culture in the lower Mississippi Valley.

Laura Murphy uses nearly forty survivor narratives from around the world to demonstrate that slavery is not a heinous phenomenon of the past, but of the present as well. Her work is essential to students of American history; it ensures that slavery is never presented as merely a crime of the past or only as a despicable practice isolated to one geographic region.

Imagine slaves and we generally think of the workers on the cash-crop plantations of the British Caribbean or the southern states of antebellum America. Roman slavery was in many ways a more complicated institution and owning slaves was as much about status as it was about economic exploitation. Bradley's excellent book goes into tremendous detail but always manages to do so with amazing clarity. Definitely the best introduction to a difficult other world.

By now, it should be clear I like trilogies, reading and writing them. The Lyhhrt Trilogy is a perfect example of incredible imagination and wordsmith talent. As in some of my writings, there is palpable lyrical style and a dense compositional approach to a story that explores the awful and worming guts that must be, de facto, the only way any vast empire can form, emboweled and ejected into reality. The Galactic Federation here is a hostage of the nobility or despicable evilness of those carrying authority in the governing organization: game of thrones anyone? The spine of the story, as in The Law, is of a GalFed Judge who realizes cruelty and slavery are the crude reality in an empire focused on satisfying the same base urges that humanity spends so much energy on today. A well envisioned complicated and messy universe, the way it should be.

That enslaved people were considered commodities is no secret. But in this book, Daina Ramey Berry demonstrates how enslaved people were attached to monetary prices throughout their entire lives. Indeed, enslaved people were in the market even before they were born, and they remained in the market even after they had died. But Berry reminds us that enslaved people themselves understood that their “soul value,” and not their supposed economic value, defined who they really were.

Until I read The Resurrection of Nat Turner, I considered myself a pacifist. I ended this novel and its sequel rooting for violent resistance and for Nat Turner, the man who led the most famous slave rebellion in American history, a man who was responsible for the deaths of women and children. In a culture of violence and unequivocal evil, turning the other cheek cannot be the only recourse. Foster left me forever changed.

A great and controversial novel—aren’t great novels always controversial?—The Confessions of Nat Turner takes as its starting point the mind of a slave, Nat Turner, as he awaits his execution for leading a failed slave rebellion in 1831. Even when it was published in 1967, the novel inspired a strong backlash from the African-American community, who were upset, in part, because of the portrayal of a Black man lusting after a White woman. Written by a Southern White, the novel is a powerful story, powerfully told, one that remains as relevant today as it did when it was first published. 

My favorite books are the ones with heroes and heroines you don’t expect – the ones that remind you that we can all be heroes and heroines if we find our gifts and persevere until others see and benefit from them, too. That’s what It Jes’ Happened does with this story of Bill Traylor, a formerly enslaved man who began to draw pictures based on his memories of rural and urban life in Alabama. Adding to the wonder of his story, this self-taught artist didn’t start painting until he was 85, reminding us it’s never too late to do what you love. Author Don Tate is best known as an award-winning illustrator, but here he reminds us that he paints with words, too. Meanwhile, R. Gregory Christie’s warm, wistful art helps us see the world through Traylor’s eyes and heart.

Philip J. Schwarz’s Twice Condemned adeptly analyzes the history of enslaved African Americans' relationship with the criminal courts of the Old Dominion from roughly 1700 to the end of the Civil War.  Based on over four thousand trials from the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods, no other book does such a comprehensive job of analyzing the prevalence, longevity, and variety of behavior attributed to slave convicts. This book also provides a detailed picture of how one slave society evolved, and along the way, it uncovers previously unexamined aspects of slave culture, and of slave owners' attitudes toward the "domestic enemy" in their midst.  Schwarz argues that the judicial system for slaves served two purposes: it helped slave owners control slaves and enabled authorities to sanction criminal behavior. This dual function of slave trials mirrored the two kinds of slaves' behavior judges tried to suppress.

When focused on slave… show more.

Toni Morrison once described her books as simple stories about complicated characters, and this also applies to The Known World. This beautifully-written novel, told from the perspective of slave-owners, surprises—but in this case, because they’re Black.

I’d come across an instance of African American slave-owning (which were very few) while researching my first book. Jones understands that the contradictions of the premise offer a great opportunity to explore the fiction of American racial identity.

In The Known World, there are no characters in white hats and others in black hats. The African American characters are no more noble than the white ones.

No, slavery corrupts all.

Because White citizens outmanned and outgunned Black people in the antebellum South, enslaved people revolted far less frequently than their counterparts in other times and places; nevertheless, as Franklin and Schweninger demonstrate, these people continually resisted their captivity by taking flight. Whether securing a short respite from a vicious overseer, temporarily reuniting with loved ones, or seeking permanent freedom in a distant place or region, fugitive slaves subverted the slave society that comprised the antebellum South and thus helped put the republic on the path toward civil war.

A Black attorney is forced to participate in a plot to bring back slavery—with a particular variation. What could go wrong? Taut writing and suspenseful storytelling carry the weight of history in Forty Acres. The concept is bold and audacious, and I never questioned a word of it. The execution is that impressive.

In the 1930’s some very forward-thinking person at the Work Projects Administration got the idea to interview former slaves and record their stories before it was too late, and their stories had been lost.

The result was some 2,300 interviews with men and women who had been enslaved across many states (not just the South). The interviews are generally brief but always unvarnished and compelling.

The resulting record of their lives and experiences will leave a mark on anyone who reads them. And you should read them.

Equiano’s autobiography fascinated me when I stumbled upon a paperback edition of it in a local bookstore nearly thirty years ago.

A bestseller during Equiano’s lifetime, his Interesting Narrative is appreciated as a work of enduring historical and literary value. The odyssey he recounts takes him from enslavement as a child in Africa to becoming a leading figure in the struggle to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.

Along the way, he serves in the British Royal Navy, gains his freedom, participates in a scientific expedition to the Arctic, has a religious conversion, observes various kinds of slavery in North and Central America, England, Europe, and the Middle East before agreeing to help administer settling in Africa formerly enslaved poor Blacks who had joined the British forces during the American Revolution.

Based on actual slave documents, Ashley Bryan, through his accomplished paintings and poetry, imagines the lives of eleven men and women sold at auction in 1828. We learn the market prices of the eleven, but Bryan goes deep, showing us the true value of each unique individual. The soul and spirit of this lovely book lay in the astounding resilience, the survival of hope and dreams in the hearts and minds of these enslaved people. Amidst the ugliness of slavery, Bryan manages to leave me uplifted, even joyful — joyful about the unwavering human belief in and desire for freedom.