The Schlager Anthology of Black America offers a modern, original sourcebook covering Black history from the 1500s to the present.

Table of Contents

• Reader’s Guide
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: 1540s-1874
• Chapter 1: Many Thousands Gone: Black Experiences in Colonial America
• “Narratives of Estevanico el Negro in the Southwest”
• Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother
• Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage
• “A Minute Against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting”
• Maryland: An Act Concerning Negro Slaves
• Virginia: An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves
• Louisiana’s Code Noir
• James Oglethorpe: “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina”
• John Woolman: Some Considerations on Keeping Negroes
• Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz: The History of Louisiana
• Alexander Falconbridge: An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
• Venture Smith: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa
• Chapter 2: In Hope of Liberty: African American Life in the Age of Revolution
• Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation
• Phillis Wheatley: “His Excellency General Washington”
• Petition of Prince Hall and Other African Americans to the Massachusetts General Court
• Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery
• “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George”
• Chapter 3: Now Comes the Test: Race, Nation, and the Limits of Freedom in the Early Republic
• Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson
• Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
• Richard Allen: “An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice”
• Prince Hall: “A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge”
• Ohio Black Code
• Letter of William C.C. Claiborne to James Madison
• Peter Williams Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”
• Laws of the Creek Nation
• Benjamin Latrobe: “New Orleans and Its People”
• Missouri Compromise
• Laws of the Cherokee Nation
• Zephaniah Kingsley: “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Slavery”
• “Jim Crow”
• James Creecy: “Language, Dances, Etc. in New Orleans”
• John C. Calhoun: “Slavery a Positive Good”
• Victor Séjour: “The Mulatto”
• United States v. Amistad
• Salmon P. Chase: Reclamation of Fugitives from Service
• Oregon Exclusion Law
• Charles K. Whipple: “Slavery among the Cherokees and the Choctaws”
• Chapter 4: There Is a River: Abolitionism and Black Protest in Antebellum America
• Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm: First Freedom’s Journal Editorial
• David Walker: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
• William Lloyd Garrison: First Liberator Editorial
• The Confessions of Nat Turner
• Lydia Maria Child: An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
• Henry Highland Garnet: “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”
• William Lloyd Garrison: “Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States”
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• William Wells Brown: “Slavery As It Is”
• Frederick Douglass: First Editorial of the North Star
• Frederick Douglass: “Letter To My Old Master”
• Bureel W. Mann: Letter to the American Colonization Society
• Sojourner Truth: “Ain’t I a Woman?”
• Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself
• Frederick Douglass: “Fourth of July” Speech
• Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
• American Colonization Society: “Things Which Every Emigrant to Liberia Ought to Know”
• Solomon Northup: Twelve Years a Slave
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Speech for the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society
• H. Ford Douglas: “Independence Day”
• Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Chapter 5: A Divided Nation: The Turbulent Fifties
• Compromise of 1850
• Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• John S. Rock: “Whenever the Colored Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions”
• William Lloyd Garrison: Speech Relating to the Execution of John Brown
• Wendell Phillips: “The Puritan Principle and John Brown”
• Virginia Slave Code
• Osborne P. Anderson: A Voice from Harper’s Ferry
• Chapter 6: The Dawn of Freedom: The Civil War and the Reconstruction of a Nation
• W. L. Harris: Address to the Georgia General Assembly
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Frederick Douglass: “Men of Color, To Arms!”
• U.S. War Department General Order 143
• “An Ordinance to Organize and Establish Patrols for the Police of Slaves in the Parish of St. Landry”
• Arnold Bertonneau: “Every Man Should Stand Equal before the Law”
• James H. Payne: Letter about “Sister Penny”
• Thomas Morris Chester: Civil War Dispatches
• John Jones: “The Black Laws of Illinois: And a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed”
• William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15
• Thirteenth Amendment
• Convention of Colored Men: Address to the Loyal Citizens of the United States and to Congress
• Black Code of Mississippi
• Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks
• Wesley Norris: “Testimony of Wesley Norris”
• Fourteenth Amendment
• Henry McNeal Turner: Speech on His Expulsion from the Georgia Legislature
• Initiation Charge of the Ku Klux Klan
• Fifteenth Amendment
• Richard Harvey Cain: “All That We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights”
• Part 2: 1877-1959
• Chapter 7: The Betrayal of the Negro: Black Accommodation and Black Protest in the Era of Jim Crow
• “The Largest Colored Colony in America”
• Frederick Douglass: “Our National Capitol” Lecture
• Report of the Minority, in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States
• Pace v. Alabama
• Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1883
• Lucy Parsons: “The Negro: Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayers to the Preacher”
• Anna Julia Cooper: “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race”
• George Washington Williams: Open Letter to King Leopold on the Congo
• John L. Moore: “In the Lion’s Mouth”
• Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women”
• Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address
• Plessy v. Ferguson
• W. E. B. Du Bois: “Strivings of the Negro People”
• Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women”
• H. T. Johnson: “The Black Man’s Burden”
• James W. Poe: “The Slaughter in the Philippines and Its Relation to Massacres of Our People in the South”
• John W. Galloway: Black Soldier’s Letter from the Philippines
• James Weldon Johnson: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
• George H. White: Farewell Address to Congress
• W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
• W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Parting of the Ways”
• Ida B. Wells: “Booker T. Washington and His Critics”
• Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles
• Kelly Miller: “The Economic Handicap of the Negro in the North”
• Booker T. Washington: Letter to William Howard Taft
• Ida B. Wells: “Lynching: Our National Crime”
• Arthur A. Schomburg: “Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges, etc.”
• Monroe Trotter: Protest to Woodrow Wilson
• W. E. B. Du Bois: The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant
• “A Memorial to the Atlanta, Georgia, Board of Education”
• Chapter 8: If We Must Die: World War I and the New Negro Renaissance
• W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Migration of Negroes”
• Robert Russa Moton: “The American Negro and the World War”
• “The Colored Americans in France”
• “Africa and the World Democracy”
• W. E. B. Du Bois: “Returning Soldiers”
• Claude McKay: “If We Must Die”
• “How to Stop Lynching”
• “The Negro and the Labor Union: An NAACP Report”
• “The Riot at Longview, Texas”
• William Pickens: “The Woman Voter Hits the Color Line”
• Cyril Briggs: Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood
• Walter F. White: “Election Day in Florida”
• William Pickens: “Lynching and Debt Slavery”
• Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”
• “To the World” (Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress)
• Jessie Redmon Fauset: “Some Notes on Color”
• Marcus Garvey: “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association”
• Claude McKay: “Soviet Russia and the Negro”
• Horace Mann Bond: “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda”
• Eric D. Walrond: “Imperator Africanus—Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?”
• Alain Locke: “Enter the New Negro”
• James Weldon Johnson: “Harlem: The Culture Capital”
• Marita O. Bonner: “On Being Young—A Woman—And Colored”
• Helene Johnson: “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”
• Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot”
• Zora Neale Hurston: “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
• James Weldon Johnson: “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist”
• Manhattan Medical Society: “Equal Opportunity: No More, No Less!”
• Carter G. Woodson: “The Miseducation of the Negro”
• Buck Colbert Franklin: “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims”
• Sterling Brown: “Ma Rainey”
• Chapter 9: Making a New Deal: African Americans, Organized Labor, and Shifting Political Alliances
• Elmer A. Carter: “Communism and the Negro Tenant Farmer”
• “Appeal of the Scottsboro Mothers”
• Cyril Briggs: “War in the East”
• William Patterson: “Manifesto to the Negro People”
• W. E. B. Du Bois: “Marxism and the Negro Problem”
• Letter from Benjamin J. Davis to Samuel Leibowitz
• Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts”
• Walter F. White: “U.S. Department of (White) Justice”
• African Americans’ New Deal Letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt
• John Henry: “Landlord, What in the Heaven Is the Matter with You?”
• Richard Wright: “Blueprint for Negro Writing”
• Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”
• Folk Music of the United States, Album III: Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads
• Chapter 10: Double V: African Americans, World War II, and the Cold War
• A. Philip Randolph: “Call to Negro America to March on Washington”
• Bayard Rustin: “The Negro and Nonviolence”
• National War Labor Board: Case No. 771 in the Matter of Southport Petroleum Company (Texas City, Texas) and Oil Workers’ International Union
• Richard Wright: “The White Problem in the United States”
• W. E. B. Du Bois: “An Appeal to the World”
• To Secure These Rights
• Charles Hamilton Houston: Petition in Hurd v. Hodge
• Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted”
• Civil Rights Congress: “We Charge Genocide”
• Paul Robeson: “Ho Chi Minh Is the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China”
• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
• Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: Speech on Civil Rights
• James W. May and William Gordon: “What I Tell My Child about Color”
• Bayard Rustin: Montgomery Diary
• The Southern Manifesto (Declaration of Constitutional Principles)
• Paul Robeson: Testimony before HUAC
• George McMillan: “The Ordeal of Bobby Cain”
• Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”
• Charles C. Diggs Jr.: “Indifferent—or Irresponsible? U.S. Policy on Africa”
• Part 3: 1955-2017
• Chapter 11: From Montgomery to Selma: The Modern Civil Rights Movement
• “Negroes’ Most Urgent Needs”
• Ella Baker: “Bigger than a Hamburger”
• George McMillan: “Mr. Local Custom Must Die”
• Jeśus Colón: “Greetings from Washington” (from A Puerto Rican in New York)
• Martin Luther King Jr.: “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
• March on Washington Organizing Manual No. 2
• Martin Luther King Jr.: “I Have a Dream”
• Malcolm X: “Message to the Grass Roots”
• Malcolm X: “The Ballot or the Bullet”
• Fannie Lou Hamer: Testimony at the Democratic National Convention
• Moynihan Report
• Martin Luther King Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”
• Loving v. Virginia
• Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power”
• Kerner Commission Report
• Ella Baker: “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle”
• Ella Baker: “Developing Community Leadership”
• Interview with Gussie Nesbitt
• Jo Ann Gibson Robinson: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It
• Chapter 12: Say It Loud: Black Power and the Search for a New Radical Paradigm
• Carlos Cooks: “Hair Conking, Buy Black”
• Black Panther Party: “What We Want, What We Believe”
• Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”
• Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles)
• Piri Thomas: “Brothers Under the Skin” (from Down These Mean Streets)
• Hoyt Fuller: “Towards a Black Aesthetic”
• “Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism”
• “Mboya’s Rebuttal”
• Eldridge Cleaver: “Education and Revolution”
• Jesse Owens: Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man
• Statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement
• Angela Davis: “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation”
• Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Black Power and the Future of Black America”
• Ishmael Reed: “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto”
• FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad
• Chapter 13: From the Bullet to the Ballot: Black Politics in the Post-Civil Rights Decade
• National Black Political Convention: Gary Declaration
• Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel
• Time: “Cities: New Men for Detroit and Atlanta”
• Shirley Chisholm: “The Black Woman in Contemporary America”
• Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
• Thurgood Marshall: Equality Speech
• U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: “Affirmative Action in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination”
• Chapter 14: “I Rise”: Black Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality
• “Combahee River Collective Statement”
• Audre Lorde: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
• Melvin Boozer: Address to the Democratic National Convention
• Cheryl Clarke: “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community”
• Clarence M. Pendleton Jr.: “Comparable Worth Is Not Pay Equity: Looney Tunes and the Tooth Fairy”
• Joseph Beam: “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart”
• June Jordan: “A New Politics of Sexuality”
• Chapter 15: A Different World: African American Life and Politics at the End of the Millennium
• Jesse Jackson: Democratic National Convention Keynote Address
• Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission Report
• Jesse Jackson: “The Struggle Continues”
• John Conyers: H.R. 3745: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act
• Anita Hill: Opening Statement at the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Clarence Thomas
• “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves”
• A. Leon Higginbotham: “An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague”
• Barbara Jordan: “Change: From What to What?”
• The African American Clergy’s Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS
• Colin Powell: Commencement Address at Howard University
• Louis Farrakhan: Million Man March Pledge
• Cornel West: “The Black Church Beyond Homophobia”
• One America in the 21st Century
• Clarence Thomas: Concurrence/Dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger
• Jesse Jackson: “The Fight for Civil Rights Continues”
• Chapter 16: From Katrina to Obama and Beyond
• Congressional Report on the Response to Hurricane Katrina
• Adolph L. Reed Jr.: “When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina”
• Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union”
• Barack Obama: First Inaugural Address
• U.S. Senate Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African Americans
• Barack Obama: Address to the NAACP Centennial Convention
• Tamara Winfrey Harris: “All Hail the Queen?”
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Dissent in Shelby County v. Holder
• Alicia Garza: “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”
• “Movement for Black Lives”: Vision for Black Lives Preamble
• Barack Obama: Farewell Address
• List of Documents by Category