Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics $13.00
A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina, and her final escape and emancipation, Jacobs' narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published in 1861, is one of the most important books ever written documenting the traumas and horrors of slavery in the antebellum South.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Ignatius Critical Editions) by Ignatius Press $14.95
Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of the few options open to nineteenth century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel, a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of millions of her contemporaries. Uncle Tom's Cabin paints pictures of three plantations, each worse than the other, where even the best plantation...

The Souls of Black Folk (Dover Thrift Editions) by Dover Publications $2.50
In this founding work in the literature of black protest, Du Bois eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. He also charges that the strategy of accommodation to white supremacy would only serve to perpetuate black oppression.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Norton Critical Editions) by William L. Andrews $9.40
Upon its publication in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself became an immediate best-seller.In addition to its far-reaching impact on the antislavery movement in the United States and abroad, Douglass’s fugitive slave narrative won recognition for its literary excellence, which has since earned it a place among the classics of...

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Neeland Media LLC $3.49
"Up From Slavery" is the classic autobiography of one of the most controversial figures in American history, Booker T. Washington. "Up From Slavery", recounts Washington's rise from a Virginia tobacco farm slave to his long standing tenure as President of the famed Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. Washington's message is one of the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment for...

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Random House Trade Paperbacks $17.00
Superbly told, with the poet's gift for language and observation, Angelou's autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas - a world of which most Americans are ignorant.From the Hardcover edition.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Harper $22.00
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years.This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly...

The autobiography of an ex-colored man (Heritage series) by Candace Press
James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man takes place in post Reconstruction era America and follows the story of a young biracial male. Johnson poses a complex dilemma: because the "Ex-Colored Man," which is the only name by which the protagonist is referred, represents what, at the time was, a social contradiction of race and culture, he is forced to choose which aspect of...

The Mis-Education Of The Negro by Classic House Books $9.95
The Mis-Education of the Negro originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, is arguably his greatest book. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that African Americans of his time were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes African-Americans to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society...

The Negro by Cosimo Classics $22.99
This is the classic history of the African peoples in Africa and the New World, a repudiation of the absurd belief, widely held in the post-Civil War period, that Africans had no civilization but the one foisted upon them by their slave-trading captors. Writing for a popular audience in 1915, DuBois, one of America's greatest writers, lays out in easy-to-read, nonacademic prose the striking and...