In honor of Juneteenth, we've rounded up new and new-ish adult fiction and adult nonfiction to celebrate and learn! Make sure to check out Libby/Overdrive for even more booklists to celebrate Juneteenth. 
 
Juneteenth/Freedom day/Jubilee Day is the anniversary of June 19, 1865, the day enslaved African Americans in Texas learned they were free. Juneteenth was first celebrated in Texas in 1866, and from then on spread as a celebration around the United States. It became a federal holiday in June 2021. Celebrate Juneteenth virtually by checking out virtual programs with the Museum of the African Diaspora and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Find in-person celebrations by searching for "Juneteenth celebration" in Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco. 
 
 
Many of the featured titles are available in multiple formats. Click the titles to see what formats are available.
 
As always, if we are missing a title you'd like us to carry, let us know via our purchase request form! 

 
Fiction

Libertie : a novel
by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Coming of age as a free-born Black woman in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson struggles against her mother’s medical aspirations for her when she finds herself more drawn to a musical career that could compromise her autonomy. 75,000 first printing.
Conjure women : a novel
by Afia Atakora

A midwife and conjurer of curses reflects on her life before and after the Civil War, her relationships with the families she serves and the secrets she has learned about a plantation owner’s daughter. A first novel.
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.
Juneteenth : a novel
by Ralph Ellison

Shot on the Senate floor by a young Black man, a dying racist senator summons an elderly Black Baptist minister from Oklahoma to his side for a remarkable dialogue that reveals the deeply buried secrets of their shared past and the tragedy that reunites them
The conductors
by Nicole Glover

Having used her wits and magic to help dozens of slaves escape, a former Underground Railroad conductor settles down among the Black elite of Philadelphia with her husband, where they investigate cases that white authorities refuse. Original. A first novel.
The undertakers
by Nicole Glover

Magical practitioners and detectives living in post-Civil War Philadelphia, Hetty and Benjy Rhodes investigate the deaths of a father and son linked to the recent fires plaguing the city. Original. 25,000 first printing. Illustrations.
Beloved : a novel
by Toni Morrison

Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.
The water dancer : a novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. By the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me. Read by the author. Simultaneous. Tour.
Nonfiction
How the word is passed : a reckoning with the history of slavery across America
by Clint Smith

"'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves"
All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
by Tiya Miles

The story of how three generations of Black women have passed down a family treasure—a sack filled with a few precious items given from an enslaved woman to her daughter in 1850s South Carolina.
Remembering Slavery : African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
by Ira Berlin

A republication of an anthology of first-person histories about the experiences of slavery is complemented by re-mastered compact discs in MP3 format containing its researchers' extensive original live recordings. Reprint.
Four hundred souls : a community history of African America, 1619-2019
by Ibram X. Kendi

Co-edited by the National Book Award-winning author of How to Be an Antiracist, a 400-year chronicle of African-American history is written in five-year segments as documented by 80 multidisciplinary historians, artists and writers. Illustrations.
Forever free : the story of emancipation and Reconstruction
by Eric Foner

Analyzes the post-Civil War era of Emancipation and Reconstruction with an emphasis on discovering the larger political and cultural meaning for contemportary America of the lives of the newly freed slaves and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. 35,000 first printing.
On Juneteenth
by Annette Gordon-Reed

In this intricately woven tapestry of American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us.
The warmth of other suns : the epic story of America's great migration
by Isabel Wilkerson

An epic history covering the period from the end of World War I through the 1970s chronicles the decades-long migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West through the stories of three individuals and their families
The fire next time
by James Baldwin

At once a powerful evocation of his childhood in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, The Fire Next Time, which galvanized the nation in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, stands as one of the essential works of our literature
The 1619 Project : a new origin story
by Nikole Hannah-Jones

This ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery reimagines if our national narrative actually started in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of 20-30 enslaved people from Africa.
Jubilee : recipes from two centuries of African-American cooking
by Toni Tipton-Martin

Drawing from historical texts and rare African-American cookbooks, a collection of 125 recipes takes readers into the world of African-American cuisine made by enslaved master chefs, free caterers and black entrepreneurs and culinary stars that goes far beyond soul food. Illustrations.
Envisioning emancipation : Black Americans and the end of slavery
by Deborah Willis

In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs--some never before published--from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration.
Stony the road : Reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow
by Henry Louis Gates

Chronicles America's post-Civil War struggle for racial equality and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated black Americans throughout the twentieth century, as seen through the visual culture of the era
Between the world and me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Told through the author's own evolving understanding of the subject over the course of his life comes a bold and personal investigation into America's racial history and its contemporary echoes. Illustrations. Tour.