25 Black authors and scholars writing on American slavery, including true slave narratives and oral histories as well as fictional accounts that debunk the myths of the middle passage and shed light on the horrors of chattel slavery in the United States.
Oral Histories
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves
Norman R. Yetman (Editor), When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection
Autobiographies
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and My Bondage and My Freedom
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince
William Still, The Underground Railroad
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
Biographies and other Non-Fiction
Daina Ramey Berry, The Price For Their Pound Of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True
Andrew Billingsley, Yearning to Breathe Free
Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household
Julius Lester, Day of Tears
Craig Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities
Fiction
William Wells Brown, Clotel: or, The President's Daughter
Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
Maryse Conde, Segu and Children of Segu
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of An American Family
Virginia Hamilton, Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave
Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Margaret Walker, Jubilee
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad