Notes: We've all heard about the heroic work of people like Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks in the 20th-century integration of baseball and public-transit systems; we know about that century's voting-rights struggle and fight for school integration. Very few of us, however, know much about the civil-rights movement that preceded the Civil War, included some similar events and episodes, and was led by both white AND black Americans, including the title figure of this monumental, meticulously-researched book that reads like a fast-paced novel. An orator, writer, teacher, civil-rights activist and expert second baseman, Octavius Catto was murdered outside his Philadelphia home on Election Day 1871, at the age of 32. Much more than just his biography, this book, which includes extensive endnotes and a lengthy bibliography, will fill in the cavernous gaps in most readers' knowledge of his life and times.

Notes: Born in Maryland in February 1818 to a slave named Harriet Bailey and an unknown white man, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey escaped in September 1838, traveled north by train and boat, married a woman named Anna Murray and settled in New Bedford, where he became well known and highly regarded as an abolitionist with powerful oratorical and writing skills. By the time of his death in 1895 he was the most influential African American man of his era, internationally known as an indomitable and ardent advocate of racial equality. More than just the story of his life, My Bondage and My Freedom includes some of his speeches and essays, and is written with passion and not without humor.

Notes: This highly readable biography covers much more than just Douglass' efforts as an abolitionist and equal-rights advocate--McFeely studies every aspect of Douglass' life, both personal and professional--but much of it focuses on the Civil War and the surrounding years, and the book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of Douglass, his family and fellow activists.

Notes: Beautifully illustrated with photographs and drawings (including one of a "lubricator" patented by Elijah McCoy in 1882), this anthology tells the stories of the lives, careers and accomplishments of Civil-War-era African Americans noted for their work in many fields. Among them are Frederick Douglass, teachers Sarah Mapps Douglass and Charlotte Forten Grimke, Sojourner Truth, physicians Alexander Augusta and Charles Burleigh Purvis, inventor Elijah McCoy, Congressman Robert Smalls and musicians Thomas Bethune and James Bland. Some became known primarily as abolitionists and others in military or civilian life, but all, as the book's introduction points out, "actively sought to control their own lives." Haskins is the book's General Editor.

Notes: This anthology of unabridged Civil-War-era accounts has the distinction of including exclusively those of African Americans themselves. Some are well known, others not; they are soldiers and sailors such as Sgt. William J. Brown, abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, nurse Susie King Taylor, teacher Charlotte Forten Grimke, and Elizabeth Keckley, who acquired renown for her gifts as a seamstress, becoming highly successful in that field and working for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. The key unifying feature of all the entries in this book is their authors' determination to play a leading role in their own, and their people's, liberation.

Notes: This survey of the war to end slavery and the role of African Americans in that fight includes a chronology beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Photographs of African American soldiers and a chapter on the Massachusetts 54th Regiment of African American troops are among the book's contents. (Limited availability.)

Notes: Born into slavery (and named Isabella) in upstate New York around 1797, the woman who adopted the name Sojourner Truth became one of the most ardent and vocal abolitionists and women's rights advocates of the 19th century, living through most of it: she died in 1883. Unfortunately she was unable to write her story herself, but she did have a friend, Olive Gilbert, to whom she dictated it. This Penguin Classic edition also includes writings about her and a moving description of her last days, death, and funeral.

Notes: This is a carefully-researched and detailed biography of one of the best-known leaders--conductors, as they were known--of the Underground Railroad. Larson's book delves into the vital role in Harriet Tubman's life and work of her love of family and belief in the evil of forcibly separating family members from each other, a tragic feature of American slavery. Harriet Tubman's life and work encompassed not only the Civil War's effort to free the slaves but most of the 19th century and the first twelve or thirteen years of the 20th: born around 1822, she died in 1912 or 1913.

Notes: John Washington (of Virginia) and Wallace Turnage (of Alabama), born into slavery in the first few decades of the 19th century, are unlikely to have ever met, but wrote eloquent narratives of their lives as slaves, their escape to the Union at two different points during the Civil War, and their lives after their liberation. Reminding his readers of these two men's immense courage and that of other slaves who freed themselves, as well as of the rarity of slave narratives, David Blight tells their dramatic and moving story, and includes their accounts, with very little editing.

Notes: Temple University historian Wilbert Jenkins focuses on "blacks as the central actors in their own lives and not as passive objects of a white-dominated society" (the author's own words in the Introduction, p. xiv) in this detailed and highly readable study of the era that included both the War and the following decade.