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Black History Month February 2026 |
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Nat Turner: A Graphic Novel
by Kyle Baker
The story of Nat Turner and his slave rebellion--which began on August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia--is known among school children and adults. To some he is a hero, a symbol of Black resistance and a precursor to the civil rights movement; to others he is a monster--a murderer whose name is never uttered. In Nat Turner, acclaimed author and illustrator Kyle Baker depicts the evils of slavery in this moving and historically accurate story of Nat Turner's slave rebellion. Told nearly wordlessly, every image resonates with the reader as the brutal story unfolds.
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Monk!: Thelonious, Pannonica, and the Friendship Behind a Musical Revolution
by Youssef Daoudi
She is Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a free-spirited baroness of the Rothschild family. He is Thelonious Sphere Monk, a musical genius fighting against the whims of his troubled mind. Their enduring friendship begins in 1954 and ends only with Monk's death in 1982. Set against the backdrop of New York during the heyday of jazz, Monk! explores the rare alchemy between two brilliant beings separated by an ocean of social status, race, and culture, but united by an infinite love of music.
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Fights: One Boy's Triumph Over Violence
by Joel Christian Gill
Fights is the visceral and deeply affecting memoir of artist/author Joel Christian Gill, chronicling his youth and coming of age as a Black child in a chaotic landscape of rough city streets and foreboding backwoods. Propelled into a world filled with uncertainty and desperation, young Joel is pushed toward using violence to solve his problems by everything and everyone around him. But fighting doesn't always yield the best results for a confused and sensitive kid who yearns for a better, more fulfilling life than the one he was born into, as Joel learns in a series of brutal conflicts that eventually lead him to question everything he has learned about what it truly means to fight for one's life.
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Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts
by Rebecca Hall
This graphic novel brings to light for the first time the existence of enslaved black women warriors, whose stories can be traced by carefully scrutinizing historical records; and where the historical record goes silent, Wake reconstructs the likely past of two female rebels, Adono and Alele, on the slave ship The Unity ... [The book] offers ... insight into the struggle to survive whole as a black woman in today's America; it is a historiography that illuminates both the challenges and the necessity of uncovering the true stories of slavery; and it is an overdue reckoning with slavery in New York City where two of these armed revolts took place.
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Queenie: Godmother of Harlem: A Graphic Novel
by Aurelie Levy
An NAACP Image Award Nominee, Queenie: Godmother of Harlem is a historical graphic novel inspired by the life of legendary mobster Stephanie St. Clair, the infamous criminal who made herself a legend in the 1930s. This powerful story tackles themes of colonization, corruption, police violence, and racial identity, but above all, Queenie celebrates the genius of a woman forgotten by history. Born on a plantation in the French colony of Martinique, Stephanie St. Clair left the island in 1912 and headed for the United States, eager to make a new life for herself. In New York she found success, rising up through poverty and battling extreme racism to become the ruthless queen of Harlem's mafia and a fierce defender of the Black community.
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March. Book one
by John Lewis
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.
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Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice
by Tommie Smith
In this powerful graphic memoir, track-and-field gold medalist Smith has teamed up with talented creators Anyabwile and Barnes to present a gripping story about the path that led him to courageously raise his fist in protest for racial justice on the podium at the 1968 Olympic Games.
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The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History
by David F. Walker
Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a radical political organization that stood in defiant contrast to the mainstream civil rights movement. This gripping illustrated history explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset. Using dramatic comic book-style retellings and illustrated profiles of key figures, The Black Panther Party captures the major events, people, and actions of the party, as well as their cultural and political influence and enduring legacy.
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South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
by Alice L. Baumgartner
In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.
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Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
by Richard Bell
Philadelphia, 1825. Five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
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Sheridan's Secret Mission: How the South Won the War After the Civil War
by Robert Cwiklik
A deeply researched narrative history recounting the little-known late Reconstruction-era mission of General Philip Sheridan, a Union Army hero dispatched to the South ten years after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed black citizens who were under siege by violent paramilitary groups like the White League, intent on erasing their postwar gains.
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Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America
by Douglas R. Egerton
In Thunder at the Gates, Douglas R. Egerton offers a riveting new perspective on the Civil War as he chronicles the formation and battlefield triumphs of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry-regiments led by whites but composed of black men born free or into slavery.
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The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House
by Jesse Holland
The Invisibles chronicles the African American presence inside the White House from its beginnings in 1782 until 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that granted slaves their freedom. During these years, slaves were the only African Americans to whom the most powerful men in the United States were exposed on a daily, and familiar, basis. By reading about these often-intimate relationships, readers will better understand some of the views that various presidents held about class and race in American society, and how these slaves contributed not only to the life and comforts of the presidents they served, but to America as a whole.
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A Madman's Will: John Randolph, 400 Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom
by Gregory May
With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph's wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves--and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen's dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman's Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.
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Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
by Tiya Miles
With Miles' characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, she explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman's life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it--a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.
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Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation
by Bennett Parten
In Somewhere Toward Freedom, historian Bennett Parten not only helps us understand how Sherman's March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid the foundation for the fledging efforts of Reconstruction. Sherman's March has remained controversial to this day. But as Parten reveals, it played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it.
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