A partial listing…
African Americans and the Living Constitution. [Co-edited with Genna Rae McNeil.] Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century. [Co-edited with August Meier.] Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Color and Race. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
The Color Line: The Legacy for the Twenty-First Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.
The Emancipation Proclamation. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1963.
The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943.
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.
An Illustrated History of Black Americans. [Co-edited with the editors of Time-Life Books.] New York: Time-Life Books, 1970.
The Militant South, 1800-1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1956.
My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin. [Co-edited with John Whittington Franklin.] Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
George Washington Williams, a Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 450 pp.
Racial Equality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Reconstruction: After the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.