Celebrate Black History Month with Books!

I have created this booklist to include both non-fiction and picture books for elementary school students. Often, picture books are discouraged for children who are past pre-school. This booklist demonstrates that picture books are an effective tool for children of every age, and especially when teaching historical material.  

 Africans in America, 1619-1865  by Kay Melchisedech Olson

 Minty: a story of young Harriet Tubman  by Alan Schroeder 

Young Harriet Tubman, whose childhood name was Minty, dreams of escaping slavery on the Brodas plantation in the late 1820s.

 Moses: when Harriet Tubman led her people to freedom by  Carole Boston Weatherford

 Night Boat to Freedom  by Margot Theis Raven 

At the request of his fellow slave Granny Judith, Christmas John risks his life to take runaways across a river from Kentucky to Ohio. Based on slave narratives recorded in the 1930s.

 Days Of Jubilee: The end of Slavery in the United States by Pat McKissack

  A Look at the 13th and 14th Amendments: slavery abolished, equal protection established

  The Fifteenth Amendment: African-American Men's Right to Vote  by Susan Banfield

Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War Through Reconstruction by Linda Barrnett Osborne

 Brown v. Board of Education: the battle for equal education  by Barbara A. Somervill

 Remember: the journey to school integration by Toni Morrison

 A bus of our own by Freddi Williams Evans

Although she really wants to go to school, walking the five miles is very difficult for Mabel Jean and the other black children, so she tries to find a way to get a bus for them the same as the white children have. Based on real events in Mississippi.

 Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King By Doreen Rappaport

 The Year they Walked: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott  by Beatrice Siegel

 Goin' someplace special by Patricia C. McKissack

In segregated 1950s Nashville, a young African American girl braves a series of indignities and obstacles to get to one of the few integrated places in town: the public library.

  Freedom on the menu: the Greensboro sit-ins by Carole Boston Weatherford

Storytime Lists for Black History Month