Browse by subject
Award Winning Books About Race and Civil Rights
176 books from 20 lists, 1845 to 2025
This is the subject where the fiction and the history need each other most. A Pulitzer winning account of the King years and a novel about a plantation are describing the same country from different distances, and reading either one alone leaves the picture incomplete. Both are here, by year.
Books by prize
One shelf per list, newest first on each. The prize name opens its full list.
- 2025 Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War
- 2025 Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
- 2024 No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era
- 2023 Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
- 2022 Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
- 2021 Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
- 2020 Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
- 2019 Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
- 2017 Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
- 2014 The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
- 2012 Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
- 2011 The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
- 2009 The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
- 2007 The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
- 2004 A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
- 1989 Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
- 1989 Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963
- 1982 Mary Chesnut's Civil War
- 1980 Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
- 1979 The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics
- 1977 The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
- 1972 Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
- 1963 Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878
- 1938 The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900
- 1918 A History of the Civil War, 1861–1865
- 2025 James
- 2021 The Night Watchman
- 2020 The Nickel Boys
- 2017 The Underground Railroad
- 2006 March
- 2004 The Known World
- 1993 Beloved
- 1983 The Color Purple
- 1978 Elbow Room
- 1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner
- 1965 The Keepers of the House
- 1961 To Kill a Mockingbird
- 1949 Guard of Honor
- 1942 In This Our Life
- 1933 The Store
- 2024 Big
- 2020 The Undefeated
- 2017 Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
- 1995 Smoky Night
- 1963 The Snowy Day
- 2024 King: A Life
- 2024 Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
- 2022 Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
- 2021 The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
- 2019 The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
- 2011 Washington: A Life
- 2007 The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
- 2003 Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
- 2001 W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963
- 1995 Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
- 1994 W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
- 1987 Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
- 1984 Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915
- 1961 Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
- 1951 John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
- 1942 Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe
- 1917 Julia Ward Howe
- 2023 Freewater
- 2020 New Kid
- 2016 Last Stop on Market Street
- 2000 Bud, Not Buddy
- 1991 Maniac Magee
- 1977 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
- 1974 The Slave Dancer
- 1970 Sounder
- 1966 I, Juan de Pareja
- 2023 His Name Is George Floyd
- 2022 Invisible Child
- 2021 Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
- 2018 Locking Up Our Own
- 2017 Evicted
- 2013 Devil in the Grove
- 2009 Slavery by Another Name
- 2006 Imperial Reckoning
- 2002 Carry Me Home
- 1986 Common Ground
- 1986 Move Your Shadow
- 1973 Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
- 1967 The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
- 2023 The Reformatory
- 2023 Yellowface
- 2020 The Vanishing Half
- 2017 Little Fires Everywhere
- 2012 NW
- 2009 The Help
- 2004 The Plot Against America
- 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities
- 1979 Kindred
- 1973 Sula
- 1970 The Bluest Eye
- 1946 The Street
- 1940 Native Son
- 1940 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God
- 1936 Absalom, Absalom!
- 1923 Cane
- 2022 South to America
- 2021 All That She Carried
- 2020 The Dead Are Arising
- 2019 The Yellow House
- 2018 The New Negro
- 2016 Stamped from the Beginning
- 2015 Between the World and Me
- 2008 The Hemingses of Monticello
- 2004 Arc of Justice
- 1998 Slaves in the Family
- 1991 Freedom (Vol. 1)
- 1976 The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
- 1969 White Over Black
- 2021 Hell of a Book
- 2020 Interior Chinatown
- 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing
- 2013 The Good Lord Bird
- 1990 Middle Passage
- 1988 Paris Trout
- 1953 Invisible Man
- 2021 Paradise
- 1992 Omeros
- 1991 July's People
- 1986 Death and the King's Horseman
- 2021 Postcolonial Love Poem
- 2020 The Tradition
- 2017 Olio
- 2015 Digest
- 2007 Native Guard
- 1994 Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
- 1987 Thomas and Beulah
- 1950 Annie Allen
- 2021 The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
- 2013 Americanah
- 2005 The March
- 1993 A Lesson Before Dying
- 1977 Song of Solomon
- 1975 Ragtime
- 2021 The Promise
- 2019 Girl, Woman, Other
- 2016 The Sellout
- 2015 A Brief History of Seven Killings
- 2003 Disgrace
- 1997 The God of Small Things
- 1992 Sacred Hunger
- 1982 Schindler's List
- 1974 The Conservationist
- 2021 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
- 2016 Delicious Foods
- 2012 The Buddha in the Attic
- 2010 War Dances
- 2001 The Human Stain
- 1995 Snow Falling on Cedars
- 1991 Philadelphia Fire
- 1984 Sent for You Yesterday
- 1982 The Chaneysville Incident
- 2021 Trouble the Saints
- 2020 Queen of the Conquered
- 2011 Who Fears Death
- 2019 An American Marriage
- 2006 On Beauty
- 2004 Small Island
- 2003 Property
- 2019 Down the River Unto the Sea
- 2018 Bluebird, Bluebird
- 2001 The Bottoms
- 1958 Room to Swing