Juneteenth—also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Liberation Day, and Emancipation Day—recognizes the end of slavery in the United States. Juneteenth, observed on June 19th, commemorates African-American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. These audiobooks reflect on our past and explore Black history and culture.

 

Those Who Saw the Sun: African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South

Written by Jaha Nailah Avery

Performed by Jaha Nailah Avery and Arnell Powell

Coming in July 2023!

Those Who Saw the Sun is a collection of oral histories told by Black people who grew up in the South during the time of Jim Crow. Jaha Nailah Avery is a lawyer, scholar, and reporter whose family has roots in North Carolina stretching back over 300 years. These interviews have been a personal passion project for years as she’s traveled across the South meeting with elders and hearing their stories.

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Kindred

Written by Octavia E. Butler

Performed by Kim Staunton

FX adaptation on Hulu

The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

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Truth Be Told

Written by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Performed by Robin Miles and Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Truth Be Told comprises three powerful narratives written by formerly enslaved women who lived long past emancipation. Each narrative offers a window into time and moves the listener along chronologically from the early years of a new nation, through the Civil War, and up through the perilous years of Reconstruction. Award-winning author and historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar provides an accessible and engaging introduction and afterword for each narrative, tying these figures’ lives to the arc of Black history and illuminating connections to the current global social justice movement that focuses on Black life.

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America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 60’s

Written by Elizabeth Hinton

Performed by Shayna Small

A New York Times Notable Book
Best Books of 2021: TIME, Smithsonian

What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors―and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

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Me and White Supremacy: Young Reader’s Edition

Written by Layla F. Saad

Performed by Layla F. Saad

How do we give young people the tools they need to actively dismantle racism and create a better world for everyone? From the author of the groundbreaking New York Times Bestseller, Me and White Supremacy, Layla Saad’s young readers’ edition is a timely, crucial, and empowering guide for today’s youth on how to be antiracist change makers.

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The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

Written by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

Performed by Dion Graham

2021 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Biography
2020 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to create an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic, National Book Award–winning biography, which interweaves previously unknown details of Malcolm X’s life―from harrowing Depression-era vignettes to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination―into an extraordinary account that contextualizes Malcolm X’s life against the wider currents of American history.

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Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box

Written by Evette Dionne

Performed by Karen Chilton

For African American women, the fight for the right to vote was only one battle. This Coretta Scott King Author Honor book tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement–when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle.

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