Summer Reading 2026: Black History at 6th to 8th Grade Level
Here are nine eBooks on African American History written at the 6th- to 8th-grade level. These free ebooks have not been banned from classrooms. Rather, they are not available because administrators in state education departments do not believe that the volume of reading matters to high school students. They demand textbooks that students find boring and don’t read. Other administrators don’t have the budgets for books, and have not yet turned to free eBooks.
Each link provides a button to download the ebook and a short description of the content. The titles are:
The Long Black Schooner by Emma Gelders Sterne: The Voyage of the Amistad
Revolts, Resistance and Emancipation by Dorothy Sterling: How Slaves and Society Resisted Slavery
The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves by Benjamin Drew: Fleeing to Safety in Canada
Three Autobiographies by Frederick Douglass: How He Led the Abolitionist Struggle against Slavery
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson: His Travels in the North and South
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay: Life in Harlem in the 1920s
Fire in the Flint by Walter E. White: A Doctor Returns to the Jim Crow South
W. E. B. Du Bois by Emma Gelders Sterne: A Founder of the N.A.A.C.P
Mary McLeod Bethune by Emma Gelders Sterne: She Defended the Right to Vote and Built a College
You can see longer descriptions of each book and other titles at History for Everyone: Build a Nation of Readers with Free Ebooks.
This epub has links to all of the ebooks above.
The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including the Send-to-Kindle feature in Amazon.
Download the mobi file for Amazon devices except the Send to Kindle feature here.