Welcome to Ely Library's Douglass Day virtual displays!
Explore our Douglass Day virtual displays to learn more about Black History and help us celebrate a collective day of love & action every year and all year round!
and join us Friday, February 14, from 11:30am-3pm in the Library for Douglass Day 2025 and help us transcribe the African American Perspectives Collection at the Library of Congress!
For more information on Douglass Day, click here.
by Sarah L. Silkey
During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a “black lady reformer”—a role American society denied her—and assert her right to defend her race from abroad. Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Britain, Black Woman Reformer by Sarah Silkey explores Wells’s 1893–94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society. Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates on lynching in both Britain and the United States. No longer content to view lynching as a benign form of frontier justice, Britons accepted Wells’s assertion that lynching was a racially motivated act of brutality designed to enforce white supremacy. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with potential foreign investors were forced to choose whether to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells’s campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.
by Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington's classic memoir of enslavement, emancipation, and community advancement in the Reconstruction Era. Born into slavery on a tobacco farm in nineteenth-century Virginia, Booker T. Washington became one of the most powerful intellectuals of the Reconstruction Era. As president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he advocated for the advancement of African Americans through education and entrepreneurship. In Up from Slavery, Washington speaks frankly and honestly about his enslavement and emancipation, struggle to receive an education, and life's work as an educator. In great detail, Washington describes establishing the Tuskegee Institute, from teaching its first classes in a hen house to building a prominent institution through community organization and a national fundraising campaign. He also addresses major issues of the era, such as the Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan, and "false foundation" of Reconstruction policy. Up From Slavery is based on biographical articles written for the Christian newspaper Outlook and includes the full text of Washington's revolutionary Atlanta Exposition address. First published in 1901, this powerful autobiography remains a landmark of African American literature as well as an important firsthand account of post-Civil War American history. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
by Booker T. Washington
In this sequel to the landmark work Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington discusses his time spent at the school which would later become Tuskegee University. Washington was the founder and moral compass of the school, so these reflections on his work offer invaluable insight into his mind, the dreams realized and the real world struggles.
by Brian J. Daugherity
Virginia was a battleground state in the struggle to implement Brown v. Board of Education, with one of the South’s largest and strongest NAACP units fighting against a program of noncompliance crafted by the state’s political leaders. Keep On Keeping On offers a detailed examination of how African Americans and the NAACP in Virginia successfully pursued a legal agenda that provided new educational opportunities for the state’s black population in the face of fierce opposition from segregationists and the Democratic Party of Harry F. Byrd, Sr.
Keep On Keeping On is the first book to offer a comprehensive view of African Americans’ efforts to obtain racial equality in Virginia in the later twentieth century. Brian J. Daugherity considers the relationship between the various levels of the NAACP, the ideas and actions of other African American organizations, and the stances of Virginia’s political leaders, white liberals and moderates, and segregationists. In doing so, the author provides a better understanding of the connections between the actions of white political leaders and those of black civil rights activists working to bring about school desegregation. Blending social, legal, southern, and African American history, this book sheds new light on the civil rights movement and white resistance to civil rights in Virginia and the South.
by Charles L. Zelden
by Thomas L. Bynum
Historical studies of black youth activism have until now focused almost exclusively on the activities of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, the NAACP youth councils and college chapters predate both of those organizations. They initiated grassroots organizing efforts and nonviolent direct-action tactics as early as the 1930s and, in doing so, made significant contributions to the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
This deeply researched book breaks new ground in an important and compelling area of study. Thomas Bynum carefully examines the activism of the NAACP youth and effectively refutes the perception of the NAACP as working strictly through the courts. His research illuminates the many direct-action activities undertaken by the young people of the NAACP — activities that helped precipitate the breakdown of racial discrimination and segregation in America. Beginning with the formal organization of the NAACP youth movement under Juanita Jackson, the author traces the group’s activities from their early anti-lynching demonstrations through their post–World War II “withholding patronage” campaigns to their participation in the sit-in protests of the 1960s. He also explores the evolution of the youth councils and college chapters, including their sometime rocky relationship with the national office, and shows how these groups actually provided a framework for the emergence of youth activism within CORE and SNCC.
The author provides a comprehensive account of the generational struggle for racial equality, capturing the successes, failures, and challenges the NAACP youth groups experienced at the national, state, and local levels. He firmly establishes the vital role they played in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and in the burgeoning tradition of youth activism in the postwar decades.
by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall
We also recommend checking out:
by Yvonne Ryan
by Shawn Leigh Alexander
by Alexander Crummell
A major 19th-century reformer and intellectual, Alexander Crummell was the first black American to receive a degree from Cambridge University. After working in Liberia, he founded the American Negro Academy. This volume of selected writings by Crummell aims to prompt a re-evaluation of his work.
by Wilson Jeremiah Moses
This remarkable biography, based on much new information, examines the life and times of one of the most prominent African-American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Born in New York in 1819, Alexander Crummell was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, after being denied admission to Yale University and the Episcopal Seminary on purely racial grounds. In 1853, steeped in the classical tradition and modern political theory, he went to the Republic of Liberia as an Episcopal missionary, but was forced to flee to Sierra Leone in 1872, having barely survived republican Africa's first coup. He accepted a pastorate in Washington, D.C., and in 1897 founded the American Negro Academy, where the influence of his ideology was felt by W.E.B. Du Bois and future progenitors of the Garvey Movement. A pivotal nineteenth-century thinker, Crummell is essential to any understanding of twentieth-century black nationalism.
edited by Louis R. Harlan
The University of Illinois Press offers online access to The Booker T. Washington Papers, a 14-volume set published by the press. Users can search the papers, view images, and purchase the print version of the volumes. Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was an African-American educator who was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia.
by Kenneth Marvin Hamilton
This project examines the response to Booker T. Washington's death, analyzing the many ways in which both black and white Americans involved in the Yankee Protestant Ethic Movement honored or memorialized the great visionary. The northern-based Movement originally saw southerners as a people who embraced a profane ethic, one that undermined the glory of the nation. In order to shift southerners away from their lazy, inefficient, and uneducated ways, the Movement engaged them in a culture war that employed multiple educational and evangelical agencies. When white southerners resisted such interference, the Movement began concentrating more exclusively on black southerners. Washington became an advocate for the Movement, and in turn the Movement became a cornerstone of Washington's ideology. After Washington's death, leading supporters of the Movement wanted to perpetuate his vision. They used obituaries, burial rites, memorials, and eulogies as weapons of choice in their efforts to continue a culture war between a supposedly democratic North and a seemingly aristocratic South. Hamilton reexamines Washington's influences, thereby producing a new understanding of his life. Integrating an analysis of letters of solace, obituaries, and other archival documents, Hamilton examines the ways that the memory of Washington and his works were cultivated and utilized by his contemporaries to promote racial consciousness. By closely working with the documents that reflect the memory and admiration of Washington at the time of his death, Hamilton is also able to show how recollections of Washington have shifted or become obscured by more recent historical assumptions or interpretations.
and join us Wednesday, February 14, from noon-3pm in the Library for Douglass Day 2024 and help us transcribe the correspondence of Frederick Douglass!
For more information on Douglass Day, click here.
produced by HBO
Inspired by David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography, this documentary brings to life the words of our country’s most famous anti-slavery activist. Actors Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Jonathan Majors, Denzel Whitaker and Jeffrey Wright draw from five of Douglass’ legendary speeches, to represent a different moment in the tumultuous history of 19th century America.
by Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining preeminence for his oratory and anti-slavery writing.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave, first published in 1845 when its author had just achieved his freedom. Its shocking first-hand account of the horrors of slavery became an international bestseller. His eloquence led Frederick Douglass to become the first great African-American leader in the United States.
My Bondage and My Freedom is Frederick Douglass's second autobiography. First published in 1855-at the height of Douglass's involvement in the abolitionist movement-his narrative describes the steps that had led him to the forefront of the struggle for racial justice. Writing a decade of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846, and after breaking with his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass became catapulted into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, both freed and slave.
Read these two autobiographical classics of American literature and discover the brilliance and determination of the incredible leader, Frederick Douglass.
by Frederick Douglass
edited by McKivigan, Husband, & Kaufman
This volume brings together twenty of Frederick Douglass’s most historically significant speeches on a range of issues, including slavery, abolitionism, civil rights, sectionalism, temperance, women’s rights, economic development, and immigration. Douglass’s oratory is accompanied by speeches that influenced him, his reflections on successful rhetorical strategies, contemporary commentary on his performances, and modern-day assessments of his rhetorical legacy.
by Frederick Douglass
edited by
Frederick Douglass, a runaway Maryland slave, was witness to and participant in some of the most important events in the history of the American Republic between the years of 1818 and 1895. Beginning his long public career in 1841 as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass subsequently edited four newspapers and championed many reform movements. An advocate of morality, economic accumulation, self-help, and equality, Douglass supported racial pride, constant agitation against racial discrimination, vocational education for blacks, and nonviolent passive resistance. He was the only man who played a prominent role at the 1848 meeting in Seneca Falls that formally launched the women's rights movement. He was a temperance advocate and opposed capital punishment, lynching, debt peonage, and the convict lease system. A staunch defender of the Liberty and Republican parties, Douglass held several political appointments, frequently corresponded with leading politicians, and advised Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison. He met with John Brown before his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry, helped to recruit African American troops during the Civil War, attended most national black conventions held between 1840 and 1895, and served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti.
Frederick Douglass has left one of the most extensive bodies of significant and quotable public statements of any figure in American history. In the Words of Frederick Douglass is a rich trove of quotations from Douglass. The editors have compiled nearly seven hundred quotations by Douglass that demonstrate the breadth and strength of his intellect as well as the eloquence with which he expressed his political and ethical principles.
by D.H. Dilbeck
From his enslavement to freedom, Frederick Douglass was one of America's most extraordinary champions of liberty and equality. Throughout his long life, Douglass was also a man of profound religious conviction. In this concise and original biography, D.H. Dilbeck offers a provocative interpretation of Douglass's life through the lens of his faith. In an era when the role of religion in public life is as contentious as ever, Dilbeck provides essential new perspective on Douglass's place in American history.
Douglass came to faith as a teenager among African American Methodists in Baltimore. For the rest of his life, he adhered to a distinctly prophetic Christianity. Imitating the ancient Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ, Douglass boldly condemned evil and oppression, especially when committed by the powerful. Dilbeck shows how Douglass's prophetic Christianity provided purpose and unity to his wide-ranging work as an author, editor, orator, and reformer. As "America's Prophet," Douglass exposed his nation's moral failures and hypocrisies in the hopes of creating a more just society. He admonished his fellow Americans to truly abide by the political and religious ideals they professed to hold most dear. Two hundred years after his birth, Douglass's prophetic voice remains as timely as ever.
by Dickson J. Preston
Drawing on previously untapped sources, Young Frederick Douglass recreates with fidelity and in convincing detail the background and early life of the man who was to become “the gadfly of America’s conscience” and the undisputed spokesman for nineteenth-century black Americans.
With a new foreword by renowned Douglass scholar David W. Blight, Dickson J. Preston’s highly regarded biography traces the life and times of Frederick Douglass from his birth on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818 until 1838, when he escaped from slavery to emerge upon the national scene. Astounding his white contemporaries with his oratorical brilliance and intellectual capabilities, Douglass dared to challenge the doctrine of white supremacy on its own grounds. At the time of Douglass’s death in 1895, one eulogist wrote that he was probably the best-known American throughout the world since Abraham Lincoln.
by Frederick Douglass
edited by Theodore Hamm
This volume compiles original source material that illustrates the complex relationship between Frederick Douglass and the city of Brooklyn. Most prominent are the speeches the abolitionist gave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Plymouth Church, and other leading Brooklyn institutions. Whether discussing the politics of the Civil War or recounting his relationships with Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, Douglass's towering voice sounds anything but dated. An introductory essay examines the intricate ties between Douglass and Brooklyn abolitionists, while brief chapter introductions and annotations fill in the historical context.
by David W. Blight
**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History**
As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.
In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe).
edited by Neil Roberts
Frederick Douglass was a writer and public speaker whose impact on America has been long studied by historians and literary critics. Yet as political theorists have focused on the legacies of such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Douglass’s profound influence on Afro-modern and American political thought has often been undervalued.
In an effort to fill this gap in the scholarship on Douglass, editor Neil Roberts and an exciting group of established and rising scholars examine the author’s autobiographies, essays, speeches, and novella. Together, they illuminate his genius for analyzing and articulating core American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom, particularly in the context of slavery. The contributors explore Douglass’s understanding of the self-made American and the way in which he expanded the notion of individual potential by arguing that citizens had a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also those of their communities.
A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass also considers the idea of agency, investigating Douglass’s passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Various essays illuminate Douglass’s complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others explore and critique concepts of masculinity, gender, and judgment in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass’s contributions to pre- and post-Civil War jurisprudence.
by Nicholas Buccola
Frederick Douglass, one of the most prominent figures in African-American and United States history, was born a slave, but escaped to the North and became a well-known anti-slavery activist, orator, and author. In The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, Nicholas Buccola provides an important and original argument about the ideas that animated this reformer-statesman. Beyond his role as an abolitionist, Buccola argues for the importance of understanding Douglass as a political thinker who provides deep insights into the immense challenge of achieving and maintaining the liberal promise of freedom. Douglass, Buccola contends, shows us that the language of rights must be coupled with a robust understanding of social responsibility in order for liberal ideals to be realized. Truly an original American thinker, this book highlights Douglass's rightful place among the great thinkers in the American liberal tradition.
by Nicholas Knowles Bromell
by Damon Root
In this timely and provocative book, Damon Root reveals how Frederick Douglass’s fight for an antislavery Constitution helped to shape the course of American history in the nineteenth century and beyond. At a time when the principles of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were under assault, Frederick Douglass picked up their banner, championing inalienable rights for all, regardless of race. When Americans were killing each other on the battlefield, Douglass fought for a cause greater than the mere preservation of the Union. “No war but an Abolition war,” he maintained. “No peace but an Abolition peace.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, when state and local governments were violating the rights of the recently emancipated, Douglass preached the importance of “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box” in the struggle against Jim Crow.
Frederick Douglass, the former slave who had secretly taught himself how to read, would teach the American people a thing or two about the true meaning of the Constitution. This is the story of a fundamental debate that goes to the very heart of America’s founding ideals—a debate that is still very much with us today.
by Waldo E. Martin
Frederick Douglass was unquestionably the foremost Black American of the nineteenth century. The extraordinary life of this former slave turned abolitionist orator, newspaper editor, social reformer, race leader, and Republican party advocate has inspired many biographies over the years. This, however, is the first full-scale study of the origins, contours, development, and significance of Douglass's thought.
Brilliant and to a large degree self-taught, Douglass personified intellectual activism; he possessed a sincere concern for the uses and consequences of ideas. Both his people's struggle for liberation and his individual experiences, which he envisioned as symbolizing that struggle, provided the basis and structure for his intellectual maturation. As a representative American, he internalized and, thus, reflected major currents in the contemporary American mind. As a representative Afro-American, he revealed in his thinking the deep-seated influence of race on Euro-American, Afro-American, or, broadly conceived, American consciousness. He sought to resolve in his thinking the dynamic tension between his identities as a black and as an American.
produced by Doctoroff Media Group
The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass comes back to life in this acclaimed theatrical performance featuring Fred Morsell, as he dramatically re-creates Douglass’s famous speech on slavery and human rights. With an eloquence and intelligence rarely matched, Frederick Douglass became a giant in the struggle against racial injustice. He called upon all Americans of every color to work to fulfill the vision of a just society that was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This program was filmed at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, D.C., where Douglass delivered his celebrated last speech, "The Lesson of the Hour." A Bill Moyers special.
by Frederick Douglass
edited by Philip S. Foner; abridged & adapted by Yuval Taylor
One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during his life—from the abolition of slavery to women’s rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to black nationalism. Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass’s hundreds of speeches, letters, articles, and editorials into an impressive five-volume set, now long out of print. Abridged and condensed into one volume, and supplemented with several important texts that Foner did not include, this compendium presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass’s massive oeuvre.
by Frederick Douglass
edited by John R. McKivigan
The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three: Correspondence, v. 1
by L. Diane Barnes
by Frederick Douglass
This International best seller is the dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave, first published in 1845, when its author had just achieved his freedom.
and join us Tuesday, February 14, from noon-3pm in the Library Instruction Classroom or on Zoom for Douglass Day 2023 and help us transcribe the works of Mary Ann Shadd Cary!
For more information on Douglass Day, click here.
For more on Mary Ann Shadd Cary, click check out his short bio.
by Jane Rhodes
(currently on Course Reserve under Douglass Day Read)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a courageous and outspoken 19th-century African American who used the press and public speaking to fight slavery and oppression in the United States and Canada. Her life provides a window on the free black experience, emergent black nationalisms, African Americans’ gender ideologies, and the formation of a black public sphere.
by Rodger Streitmatter
Each chapter is a biographical sketch of an influential black woman who has written for American newspapers or television news, including Maria W. Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Josephine St.Pierre Ruffin, Delilah L. Beasley, Marvel Cooke, Charlotta A. Bass, Alice Allison Dunnigan, Ethel L. Payne, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
by Gerda Lerner
In this fine collection of rare documentary sources, many of them previously unpublished, African-American women in their rich diversity speak of themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their struggles. Theirs are stores of oppression and survival, of family and community self-help, of inspiring heroism and grass-roots organizational continuity in the face of racism, economic hardship, and, far too often, violence. In the spirit of the slave mother who counseled her daughter, "Fight, and if you can't fight, kick; if you can't kick, then bite," black women resisted sexual abuse and economic oppression, cared for black children and neighbors, and organized for survival and political power. Their vivid accounts, their strong and insistent voices, make for inspiring reading, enriching our understanding of the American past.
by Nancy Forestell & Maureen Moynagh
by Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman
by Cheryl Harness
Enhanced with full-color illustrations, profiles twenty women whose actions and deeds have had an impact on American history over the past two hundred years, including Civil War physician Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, campaign-finance reformist Doris Haddock, and others.
edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart
Two epochal developments profoundly influenced the history of the Atlantic world between 1770 and 1870―the rise of women’s rights activism and the drive to eliminate chattel slavery. The contributors to this volume, eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, investigate the intertwining histories of abolitionism and feminism on both sides of the Atlantic during this dynamic century of change. They illuminate the many ways that the two movements developed together and influenced one another.
Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the authors ask how conceptions of slavery and gendered society differed in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain; how women’s activism reached across national boundaries; how racial identities affected the boundaries of women’s activism; and what was distinctive about African-American women’s participation as activists. Their thought-provoking answers provide rich insights into the history of struggles for social justice across the Atlantic world.
by Lana F. Rakow
Originally published in 1992. This book captures the dynamic confluence of feminist and communication scholarship by setting out some of the provocative questions that mark this intersection. Several of the essays in the book are theoretical in nature, and consider the changing complexion of the field in view of this cross-fertilization; other contributors tackle those individual forms of communication that pose certain challenges for women such as verbal harassment and pornography. The final section of the book, more ethnographic in nature, presents a number of case studies, written primarily by women of colour, which recount the various ways that communication forms such as television, journalism and spoken discourse construct and perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes.
Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd
Finding a Place: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and the Dilemmas of Black Migration to Canada, 1850-1870
The Contestation over National Identity: Nineteenth-Century Black Americans in Canada
edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson
This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. While Black-led activism in this era is often overshadowed by the attention paid to the abolition movement, this collection centers Black activist networks, influence, and institution building. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism.
by Martha S. Jones
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals. -Amazon
edited by Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage
Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture.
by Utz McKnight
Free Black woman, poet, novelist, essayist, speaker, and activist, Frances Watkins Harper was one of the nineteenth century’s most important advocates of Abolitionism and female suffrage, and her pioneering work still has profound lessons for us today.
In this new book, Utz McKnight shows how Harper’s life and work inspired her contemporaries to imagine a better America. He seeks to recover her importance by examining not only her vision of the possibilities of Emancipation, but also her subsequent role in challenging Jim Crow. He argues that engaging with her ideas and writings is vital in understanding not only our historical inheritance, but also contemporary issues ranging from racial violence to the role of Christianity.
This lucid book is essential reading not only for students of African American history, but also for all progressives interested in issues of race, politics, and society. -Amazon
edited and with an introduction by Frances Smith Foster
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the best known and best loved African-American poet of her time, as well as a teacher and lecturer on abolition, suffrage, education, and many other topics. This anthology contains all of her extant poetry and a generous selection of prose and letters, and provides moving portraits of suffering under slavery, as well as of freedom, love, infidelity, poverty, and heroism. -Amazon
by Michael Stancliff
Examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's radically egalitarian practice through her involvement in the abolitionist movement, emancipation, Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era, placing her work firmly in black-nationalist lineages. This book contributes to the contemporary portrayal of Harper as a theorist of African-American feminism.
by Kelly Lytle Hernández
Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.
by Marne L. Campbell
Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only 12 Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following 70 years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles.
by Mary Church Terrell
Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women's suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women's suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women's rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women's rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others. -Amazon
by Brittney C. Cooper
Beyond Respectability" charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how - and who - produced racial knowledge.
by Mary Church Terrell
The 20-page pamphlet you can read here focuses mainly on Stowe herself, and the role she played during her life in efforts to improve the lives of the country's black citizens. It contains only one passing reference (on page 17) to the racial discrimination that still made those lives so difficult at the time Terrell was writing. Its treatment of Uncle Tom, however, expresses no reservations about the novel. Tom himself she calls "a philosopher in mind, a saint at heart, and a martyr in death." -University of Virginia
by Joan Quigley
In Just Another Southern Town, Joan Quigley recounts an untold chapter of the civil rights movement: an epic battle to topple segregation in Washington, the symbolic home of American democracy. At the book's heart is the formidable Mary Church Terrell and the test case she mounts seeking to enforce Reconstruction-era laws prohibiting segregation in D.C. restaurants. Through the prism of Terrell's story, Quigley reassesses Washington's relationship to civil rights history, bringing to life a pivotal fight for equality that erupted five years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus and a decade before the student sit-in movement rocked segregated lunch counters across the South. -Amazon
edited with introductions by Richard W. Leeman and Bernard K. Duffy
Drawing upon nearly two hundred years of recorded African American oratory, The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches, edited by Richard W. Leeman and Bernard K. Duffy, brings together in one unique volume some of this tradition's most noteworthy speeches, each paired with an astute introduction designed to highlight its most significant elements. Arranged chronologically, from Maria Miller Stewart's 1832 speech "Why Sit Ye Here and Die?" to President Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address, these orations are tied to many of the key themes and events of American history, as well as the many issues and developments in American race relations. These themes, events, and issues include the changing roles of women, Native American relations, American "manifest destiny," abolitionism, the industrial revolution, Jim Crow, lynching, World War I and American self-determination, the rise of the New Deal and government social programs, the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, the Vietnam War, Nixon and Watergate, gay and lesbian rights, immigration, and the rise of a mediated culture. Leeman and Duffy have carefully selected the most eloquent and relevant speeches by African Americans, including those by Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and Marian Wright Edelman, many of which have never received significant scholarly attention. The Will of a People is the first book to pair the full texts of the most important African American orations with substantial introductory essays intended to guide the reader's understanding of the speaker, the speech, its rhetorical interpretation, and the historical context in which it occurred. Broadly representative of the African American experience, as well as what it means to be American, this valuable collection will serve as an essential guide to the African American oratory tradition.
Documents selected and interpreted by Alison M. Parker
Mary Church Terrell's international experiences and perspectives were reflected in her analysis of race relations and her call for racial justice in the United States. Terrell returned from her European visits with anti-colonial insights and fresh ammunition in her struggle against American racial prejudice. Her international experiences and perspectives allowed Terrell to approach the fight for civil rights as a broader, linked struggle for all women and people of color around the world. -Abstract
by Beverly Washington Jones
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edited by Sandra J. Sarkela, Susan Mallon Ross, and Margaret A. Lowe
In this “stunning collection of documents” (Washington Post Book World), African-American women speak of themselves, their lives, ambitions, and struggles from the colonial period to the present day. Theirs are stories of oppression and survival, of family and community self-help, of inspiring heroism and grass-roots organizational continuity in the face of racism, economic hardship, and, far too often, violence. Their vivid accounts, their strong and insistent voices, make for inspiring reading, enriching our understanding of the American past. -Amazon
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by Dorothy Sterling
Three heroic women whose stories, in the words of Margaret Walker, "every woman, man, and child should know": Ellen Craft, the daring runaway Georgia slave who used her freedom to serve the cause of abolition; Ida B. Wells, the firebrand journalist whose crusade against lynching awakened the consciousness of a nation; and Mary Church Terrell, a gifted and untiring leader in the movement for suffrage, civil rights, and world peace. Through painstaking research, Sterling not only produces a fascinating account of three outstanding leaders; she also documents the role hitherto "faceless, nameless millions of African American women" have played in shaping our culture and history. Reflecting and connecting the historical struggle of the years 1826 through 1954, Black Foremothers will captivate and inspire readers, young and old. -Amazon
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by Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene
Because scholars have traditionally only examined the efforts of American suffragists in relation to electoral politics, the history books have missed the story of what these women sought to achieve outside the realm of voting reform. Though Stanton, Anthony, and Mott are the best known figures of the woman's suffrage movement, all were dead more than a decade before women actually achieved the vote. Women like Alice Paul, Louisine Havermeyer, and Mary Church Terrell carried on their work, putting their campaign experiences to work long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. This book tells the story of how these women made an indelible mark on American history in fields ranging from education to art, science, publishing, and social activism.
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edited by Sandra J. Sarkela, Susan Mallon Ross, and Margaret A. Lowe
Until recently, scholars assumed that women stopped speaking after they won the vote in 1920 and did not reenter political life until the second wave of feminism began in the 1960s. Nothing could be further from the truth. While national attention did dissipate after 1920, women did not retreat from political and civic life. Rather, after winning the vote, women's public activism shifted from a single-issue agenda to the myriad social problems and public issues that faced the nation. As such, women began to take their place in the public square as political actors in their own rights rather than strictly campaigning for a women's issue.
This anthology documents women's activism during this period by introducing heretofore unpublished public speeches that address a wide array of debated topics including child labor, international relations, nuclear disarmament, consumerism, feminism and anti-feminism, social welfare, family life, war, and the environment. Some speeches were delivered in legislative forums, others at schools, churches, business meetings, and media events; still others before national political organizations. To ensure diversity, the volume features speakers of different ages, races, classes, ethnicities, geographic regions, and political persuasions. The volume editors include short biographical introductions as well as historical context for each selection. -Amazon
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