Children's Book Bundle

Freedom Center Exclusive Bundle!

What Was the Underground Railroad?

No one knows where the term Underground Railroad came from–there were no trains or tracks, only “conductors” who helped escaping slaves to freedom. Including real stories about “passengers” on the “Railroad,” this book chronicles slaves’ close calls with bounty hunters, exhausting struggles on the road, and what they sacrificed for freedom.

 What Was Reconstruction?

Reconstruction — the period after the Civil War — was meant to give newly freed Black people the same rights as white people.  Indeed, there were monumental changes once slavery ended — thriving new Black communities, the first Black members in Congress, and a new sense of dignity for many Black Americans. But this time of hope didn’t last long and instead, a deeply segregated United States continued for another hundred years. Find out what went wrong in this fascinating overview of a troubled time.

What Was the Harlem Renaissance?

Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the constant bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans–the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it. Author Sherri Smith traces Harlem’s history all the way to its seventeenth-century roots and explains how the early-twentieth-century Great Migration brought African Americans from the deep South to New York City and gave birth to the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance.

What Is the Civil Rights Movement?

Even though slavery had ended in the 1860s, African Americans were still suffering under the weight of segregation a hundred years later. They couldn’t go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, or even use the same bathrooms as white people. But by the 1950s, black people refused to remain second-class citizens and were willing to risk their lives to make a change.  Author Sherri L. Smith brings to life momentous events through the words and stories of people who were on the frontlines of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

What Is Juneteenth?

On June 19, 1865, a group of enslaved men, women, and children in Texas gathered around a Union solder and listened as he read the most remarkable words they would ever hear. They were no longer enslaved: they were free. The inhumane practice of forced labor with no pay was now illegal in all of the United States. This news was cause for celebration, so the group of people jumped in excitement, danced, and wept tears of joy. They did not know it at the time, but their joyous celebration of freedom would become a holiday–Juneteenth–that is observed each year by more and more Americans.