8th grade: Slave Narratives : Recommended Reading

Combining biography with the larger history of slavery, the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, the increasing sectionalism of the pre-Civil War era, as well as the war and post-war Reconstruction, Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom uses a variety of documents to trace the legendary life of Harriet Tubman.

This important biography takes both legend and fact and sets them into a larger historical context. We see her victories as well as her defeats--we see her as a real person. Truth comes alive in the pages of this book through her poignant, prophetic words and we realize that what she spoke of in the nineteenth century is just as relevant to us today.

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot.

Written by six black women, these stories embody most of the predominant themes and narrative forms found in African-American women's autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative recounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he was able to purchase his freedom in 1766, and his life afterward as a leading and respected figure in the antislavery movement in England.

Presents an historical fiction written in first-person format that follows Emma, the slave of Pierce Butler, through a series of events in her life as her master hosts the largest slave auction in American history in Savannah, Georgia in 1859 in order to pay off his mounting gambling debts.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

The story that inspired the major motion picture The Birth of a Nation (2016). Gives an account, based on the true story of a slave rebellion in 1831, of a noble man's moral decline.

A novel in verse about a boy escaping slavers during the nineteenth century.

From National Book Award-nominated author Edward P. Jones comes a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power. Henry Townsend, a African farmer and former slave, is befriended by the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County and becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves.

Henry Shackleford, a slave boy from the Kansas Territory, is caught up in John Brown's crusade for freedom of slaves and when he escapes from his master's home, he must disguise himself as a girl in order to stay safe and is nicknamed Onion by John.

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.