Top Black History Picks!

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. Read more

Angela Davis

An Autobiography

By: Angela Davis
Narrated by: Angela Davis
Length: 19 hours 28 minutes

This new edition of Angela Davis’s classic Autobiography features an expansive new introduction by the author.Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison-abolitionist movements for more than fifty years.Angela Davis: An Autobiography, first published and edited by Toni... Read more

The 1619 Project

A New Origin Story

By: Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman & Jake Silverstein
Narrated by: Nikole Hannah-Jones & Full Cast
Length: 18 hours 56 minutes

“This new landmark work of U.S. history, criticism, and art is forged of 18 essays that consider the relevance of slavery to contemporary America through the prism of such subjects as capitalism, music, and healthcare and poems and fiction that focus on key moments in the oppression, resistance, and liberation of Black people in America. Riveting... Read more

The New Negro

An Interpretation

By: Alain Locke
Narrated by: York Whitaker, Robin Eller, Charon Normand-Widmer, Ron Butler, J. D. Jackson, Sean Crisden, Cary Hite, Bill Andrew Quinn, Leon Nixon, Earl Sewell, Rhett Samuel Price, Lynch Travis, Dez Walker, Patryce Williams & Kevin R. Free
Length: 13 hours 38 minutes

This anthology edited by the American writer, philosopher, and patron of the arts Alain Locke brings together some of the most influential pieces of African American works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Featuring the voices of Zora Neale Thurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, Locke included commentary on the... Read more

Barracoon

The Story of the Last ""Black Cargo""

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 3 hours 49 minutes

“This book demonstrates Hurston at her finest, displaying her experience with ethnography and field research in a less fictional way, contrasted to the fictional story Their Eyes Were Watching God. This book is foundational for understanding slavery in America. Read more

John Lewis

In Search of the Beloved Community

By: Raymond Arsenault
Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln Smith
Length: 17 hours 57 minutes

For six decades John Robert Lewis was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into "good trouble."



In this biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis's upbringing in rural Alabama, his... Read more

Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words

Speeches and Writings

By: Zinga A. Fraser
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 9 hours 34 minutes

LOOKING BEYOND HER POLITICAL SYMBOLISM TO CELEBRATE NOT ONLY WHO SHIRLEY CHISHOLM WAS BUT WHO SHE IS—A REVOLUTIONARY THINKER WITH MUCH TO TEACH US TODAY

In the midst of her groundbreaking twenty-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once declared, “Everyone—with the exception of the black woman... Read more

Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962

By: Lerone Bennett
Narrated by: John Ridle
Length: 11 hours 42 minutes

The black experience in America--starting from its origins in western Africa up to 1961--is examined in this seminal study from a prominent African American figure. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial period through the civil rights upheavals of the late 1950s to 1961, the time of publication.... Read more

The Souls of Black Folk

By: W. E. B. Du Bois
Narrated by: Mirron Willis
Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature.First published in 1903, this collection of fifteen essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois' writing draws on his early... Read more

The Mis-Education of the Negro

By: Carter Godwin Woodson
Narrated by: Warren Keyes
Length: 5 hours 8 minutes

‘The Mis-Education of the Negro’ by Carter Godwin Woodson (1933), addresses important economic and social issues that were face by African-Americans. Woodson criticises education in American schools, and the emphasis on the history of the Greeks, Romans and British. He explores the legacy of slavery and the economic situation of blacks in the... Read more

The Future of the American Negro

By: Booker T. Washington
Narrated by: Andrew L. Barnes
Length: 4 hours 15 minutes

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was an African American political leader, educator and author. He was one of the dominant figures in African American history in the United States from 1890 to 1915. Born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, at the age of 9, he was freed and moved with his family to West Virginia, where he learned... Read more

A Rare Recording of Marcus Garvey

By: Marcus Garvey
Narrated by: Marcus Garvey
Length: 10 minutes

Marcus Garvey (August 17, 1887 - June 10, 1940) was a charismatic Jamaican-born political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) and acted as its President-General. In 1916 he moved to New York City where his prominence grew. By... Read more

Black Detroit

A People's History of Self-Determination

By: Herb Boyd
Narrated by: James Shippy
Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

The author of Baldwin’s Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit—a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city’s past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation’s fabric.Herb Boyd moved to Detroit in 1943, as... Read more

Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance

By: Nikki Grimes
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Janina Edwards, Karole Foreman & Zakiya Young
Length: 1 hour 19 minutes

Bloomsbury presents Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by Nikki Grimes, read by Bahni Turpin, Karole Foreman, Zakiya Young and Janina Edwards.

From Children's Literature Legacy Award-winning author Nikki Grimes comes a feminist-forward new collection of poetry celebrating the little-known women poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

For... Read more

Three Poets of the Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Countee Cullen

By: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes & Georgia Douglas Johnson
Narrated by: Ron Butler, Robin Miles & Kevin Kenerly
Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

The intellectual and cultural revival of African-American arts and politics in the 1920s and 1930s was centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.Here are poems from three major contributors to that rebirth: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Copper Sun by Countee Cullen,... Read more

Chasing Me to My Grave

An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South

By: Winfred Rembert
Narrated by: Dion Graham & Karen Chilton
Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager.He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife.... Read more