African American Archives - Zinn Education Project

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

Book — Non-fiction. By Mia Bay. 2021. From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, this book explores racial restrictions on transportation and resistance to the injustice.

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Book - Non-fiction. By Kate Masur. 2021. The history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War.

To ‘joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War

Book - Non-fiction. By Tera W. Hunter. 1998. An examination of post-Civil War lives of African American women, focusing on their labor organizing, leisure, hope, and struggle.

The Mis-Education of the Negro

Book — Non-fiction. By Carter G. Woodson. 1933. Originally released in 1933, The Mis-Education of the Negro continues to resonate today, raising questions about the legacy of slavery and enduring white supremacy.

The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools

Book - Non-fiction. By Vanessa Siddle Walker. 2018. This history tells the little-known story of how black educators in the South laid the groundwork for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and weathered its aftermath.

Black Panther Party in the News and the Classroom

COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party are back in the headlines. Let’s also make sure to teach this critical history in our classrooms.

This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality

Book — Non-fiction. By Jo Ann Allen Boyce and Debbie Levy. Told from the perspective of Jo Ann Allen, this book tells the story of twelve Black students who integrated Clinton High School in Tennessee in 1956.

Dr. Martin Luther King on Reconstruction

Dr. Martin Luther King describes the critical importance of W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction to "restore to light the most luminous achievements" of the Reconstruction era.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

Book - Non-fiction. By Alondra Nelson. 2013. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Alondra Nelson documents the Party’s focus on health care.

Behind the Veil Oral History Project

Digital Collection. Oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C.

Book - Non-fiction. By Jesse Holland. 2017. Historic sites along the Mall, such as the U.S. Capitol building, the White House, and the Lincoln Memorial, are explored with a focus on the history of African Americans who built them.

Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana

Book — Non-fiction. By Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards, and Nick Weldon. 2021. This Reconstruction history graphic novel tells the story of Oscar James Dunn, a New Orleanian who became the first Black lieutenant governor and acting governor in the United States.

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre

Book - Picture book. By Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper. 2021. 32 pp. This children's book centers the history of the thriving Black community of Greenwood before the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Book - Non-fiction. By Julian Bond. Edited by Pam Horowitz and Jeanne Theoharis with an afterword by Vann Newkirk II. 2021. 356 pp. For over two decades, civil rights activist Julian Bond taught a popular class on the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This book contains the wisdom and teachings from that class.

Separate No More: The Long Road to Brown v. Board of Education

Book - Non-fiction. By Lawrence Goldstone. 2021. A portrait of the road to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

Book - Non-fiction. Edited by Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Patterson. Introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman. 2021. This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century’s longest campaign for Black civil rights.

Reconstruction: Repression and Resistance

In a people's history online class, Professor Kidada Williams and Tiffany Mitchell Patterson discussed African American survivors of racist violence in the context of Reconstruction, drawing parallels to the contemporary moment.

They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I

Book - Non-fiction. By Kidada Williams. 2012. 281 pages. This book documents African Americans' testimonies about racial violence during Jim Crow, and the crusades against that violence that became political training grounds for the Civil Rights Movement.

Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson

Book - Non-fiction. Written and illustrated by Sharon Rudahl. Edited by Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware. 2020. 142 pages. The first-ever graphic biography of Paul Robeson charts Robeson’s career as a singer, actor, scholar, athlete, and activist who achieved global fame.

Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Denisha Jones and Jesse Hagopian. 2020. This collection of writings offers lessons from successful challenges to institutional racism that have been won through the grassroots Black Lives Matter at School movement.

The Voting Booth

Book - Fiction. By Brandy Colbert. 2020. 304 pages. A novel for high school students that centers on voting rights -- weaving in a myriad of voter suppression tactics and the importance of everyone playing a role in fighting for the right to vote.

“Riots,” Racism, and the Police: Students Explore a Century of Police Conduct and Racial Violence

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Students explore three documents produced in the wake of three major episodes of racial violence (1919, 1967, 2014) to understand the long trajectory of police violence in Black communities.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Book — Non-fiction. By Clint Smith. 2021. 336 pages. An examination of how monuments and landmarks represent — and misrepresent — the central role of slavery in U.S. history and its legacy today.

Biddy Mason Speaks Up

Book — Non-fiction. By Arisa White and Laura Atkins. 2019. 112 pages. An illustrated children's book tells the story of real-life champion for civil rights Bridget "Biddy" Mason.

When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction

By Adam Sanchez

Every day seems to bring new horrors as the U.S. president’s racist rhetoric and policies have provided an increasingly encouraging environment for attacks on Black people and other communities of color. The acquittal of yet another police officer accused of murdering a Black man in St. Louis, the raging battle across the country over whether symbols of slavery should be removed from public spaces, and the formation of a “Commission on Election Integrity” to further suppress voting by people of color are just a few of the recent reminders that racism is as American as apple pie. In moments like these, it’s worth remembering a time in U.S. history when Black lives mattered.