The history of the civil rights movement in America is seen and heard in “We Shall Overcome” (Sourcebooks, $45).

Herb Boyd’s album of text and historic photos is accompanied by two audio CDs narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The discs contain slave narratives and freedom songs, as well as historic speeches and broadcasts: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking about the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott; President Kennedy commenting about the March on Washington; President Johnson discussing the Civil Rights Bill, and news broadcasts describing the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

Among the photos are a 1964 Time magazine cover featuring King as its Man of the Year, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael addressing a group of students, and James Meredith registering for classes at the University of Mississippi accompanied by federal marshals.

Supporting the text and photos are several sidebars that reproduce song lyrics by Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, the Black Panther Party’s platform and program, and a flier announcing the March on Washington of Aug. 28, 1963.

“Negro League Baseball” (Abrams, $35) chronicles the last days of the Negro League in 150 black-and-white photos by Ernest C. Withers, unofficial team photographer for the Memphis Red Sox.

Withers’ lens captured Willie Mays (who wrote the book’s foreword), Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella and Monte Irvin among those Negro Leaguers who became major league stars, as well as several others who also made it to the “Big Show” — among them, Joe Black, “Sad” Sam Jones, “Junior” Gilliam and Harry “Suitcase” Simpson.

Many of the photos were taken at Martin’s Stadium, home of the Red Sox, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when black players began to join major league teams and interest in the Negro League began to wane.

In one image, Memphis player Charley Pride poses on the field; an injury would later end his baseball days and he would become a country music recording artist.

Josh Gibson — a great Negro League catcher whom many believe would have been a major league star — is seen at Comiskey Park in Chicago during the 1946 East-West Game in the last known photograph made of him in uniform.

Ted Raspberry, owner of the Detroit Stars, is shown with Tom Baird, the Kansas City Monarchs’ owner, at the Memphis airport.

In “Wake Up Our Souls” (Abrams, $24.95), Tonya Bolden celebrates the lives and work of more than 30 black American artists — painters, sculptors, folk artists and photographers — past and present, in text and color images of more than 45 of their works.

The volume was produced in association with Smithsonian American Art Museum, which houses all of the pieces displayed in the book.

Among them:

• “Gamin,” a painted plaster bust of a black boy with billed cap askew, created around 1929 by Augusta Savage.

“The Stranger,” an oil on canvas made by Hughie Lee-Smith in the late 1950s, which shows an alienated-looking young man in the foreground who is separated from nearby farm buildings by a wide chasm.

• “Fort Scott, Kansas,” Gordon Parks’ 1950 photo of a dapper young black man sitting alone at a lunch counter and apparently in deep thought.
• “Midnight at the Crossroads,” a 1940 oil on canvas based on a dream by artist Palmer Hayden that shows a black boy holding an oversized fiddle and bow as he stands at a fork in a desolate road.

The chronicle describes the obstacles and achievements of black artists, beginning in the late 18th century with Joshua Johnson, one of the earliest black artists. There is also a glossary of art terms, an index, and suggestions for further reading.

An Olympic gold medalist, three-time heavyweight champion and internationally recognized celebrity is the subject of “Muhammad Ali” (Abrams, $29.95), a photo album of 150 images, 50 in color, by Magnum photographers since the early 1960s.

There are images of Ali in the ring with George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Brian London; training with a punching bag; eating a huge bowl of ice cream after a fight (as was his custom); at his Champburger fast-food restaurant; and, more recently, at home in Michigan.

He is seen dining in a London restaurant with the wife of Gordon Parks; in a bakery flirting with clerk Belinda Boyd (who would become his second wife); getting a haircut; chatting with neighborhood folks while strolling under the el in Chicago; and in a gym talking to — and towering over — Johnny Coulon, the world’s bantamweight champion of 1915.