Recommended Titles to Commemorate Juneteenth

Crystal, reference supervisor at the Morgantown Public Library, originally compiled these titles to commemorate Juneteenth a few years ago. We’ve added a few more recent titles for adults and younger readers. The following are available at the Morgantown Library and many of our branches, as noted under each title. Don’t forget that you can request another branch’s copy to be delivered to your nearest library. Enjoy!

Children and Young Adult Books

Juneteenth for Mazie / Floyd Cooper
VOX COO
Mazie is ready to celebrate liberty. She is ready to celebrate freedom. She is ready to celebrate a great day in American history. The day her ancestors were no longer slaves. Mazie remembers the struggles and the triumph, as she gets ready to celebrate Juneteenth. This is a Vox picture book, meaning it has an audio track you can play to hear the story as you read! Available at Morgantown, Cheat, and Clay Battelle.

The Juneteenth Cookbook / Alliah L. Agostini
C 641.568 AGO
The Juneteenth Cookbook introduces the history of Juneteenth to kids through vibrant recipes, activities, and games drawn from Black American cultural traditions. Available at Morgantown.

What Is Juneteenth? / Kirsti Jewel
C 394.263 JEW
This entry in the popular children’s What Is/Who Was series gives an accessible overview of what happened on the first Juneteenth in 1865 and how the holiday tradition continues. The book includes 80 black-and-white illustrations and a 16-page photo insert. Available at Morgantown, Arnettsville, Clay Battelle, Cheat, and Clinton.

She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman / Erica Armstrong Dunbar
YA B Tubman
This book, written for younger readers, reveals the many complexities and varied accomplishments of one of our nation’s true heroes and offers an accessible and modern interpretation of Tubman’s life that is both informative and engaging. Available at Morgantown.

Dread Nation / Justina Ireland
YA IRE
This historical novel is a reimagining of the Civil War era where a zombie outbreak interrupts the fighting at Gettysburg and causes a racial rift in society: Indigenous and Black people are conscripted to fight the undead. Available at Morgantown, Arnettsville, and Cheat.

A Most Perilous World: The True Story of the Young Abolitionists and Their Crusade Against Slavery / Kristina R. Gaddy
YA 973.7 GAD
This book tells the stories of the four teenage children of prominent abolitionists, including those of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, before and during the Civil War combine to form a surprisingly familiar tapestry of struggle, disappointment, and ultimately hope. Available at Morgantown.

Adult Fiction and Nonfiction

James / Percival Everett
F EVE
This 2024 book is a retelling of the Mark Twain classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s friend who escaped slavery. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book will also be West Virginia University’s campus read for fall 2025. Available at Morgantown, Arnettsville, Cheat, and Clay Battelle.

Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero / Kate Clifford Larson
B Tubman
There’s no doubt that Harriet Tubman is a key historical figure, and this biography by historian Kate Clifford Larson “gives us a powerful, intimate, meticulously detailed portrait of Tubman and her times,” according to the publisher. The book draws from new documents and sources as well as extensive genealogical data. Available at Morgantown.

On Juneteenth / Annette Gordon-Reed
326.8 GOR
Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. Available at Morgantown.

The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States / Ira Berlin
326.8 BER
Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. Available at Morgantown.

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 / edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
973.0496 FOU
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled 90 brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that 400-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting 90 different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. Available at Morgantown and Cheat.

A Black Women’s History of the United States: Revisioning American history / Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
305.488 BER
This book is a critical survey of Black women’s complicated legacy in America, as it takes into account their exploitation and victimization as well as their undeniable and substantial contributions to the country since its inception. Available at Morgantown.

The Fire Next Time / James Baldwin
305.896 BAL
At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” this book stands as a classic of literature. Available at Morgantown, and as an e-book and audiobook.

Juneteenth / Ralph Ellison; ed. by John F. Callahan
F ELL
The story of a Black man who passes for white and becomes a race-baiting U.S. senator. When he is shot on the Senate floor, the first visitor in hospital is a black musician-turned-preacher who raised him. As the two men talk, their respective stories come out. Available at Morgantown.

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man / Emmanuel Acho
305.8 ACH
Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask—yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and “reverse racism.” In his own words, he provides a space of compassion and understanding in a discussion that can lack both. He asks only for the reader’s curiosity—but along the way, he will galvanize all of us to join the antiracist fight. Available at Morgantown and Cheat.

Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays / Jesse McCarthy
814 MCC
Jesse McCarthy’s bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successful upheavals, McCarthy contends, ”something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making.” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones. Available at Morgantown.

Stamped from the Beginning / Ibram X. Kendi
305.8 KEN and GN KEN Stamped Gil
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation’s racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope. Available at Morgantown, as a regular book and a graphic novel, and as an e-book.