Keywords: African Americans
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Displaying 1-20 of 225 results.
"1500 Doomed": People's Press Reports on the Gauley Bridge Disaster
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Abstract: The deadly lung disease silicosis is caused when miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers inhale fine particles of silica dust--a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite. In 1935, approximately 1,500 workers--largely African Americans who had come north to find work--were killed by exposure ... More »
"A Black Joke."
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Abstract: Free African Americans living in the North before the Civil War suffered enormous disadvantages and discriminations. Forced to sit in separate and inferior sections in theaters, public transit, and churches, free blacks were also barred from all but the most menial jobs and denied entrance to white trade ... More »
"A Bold Stroke for Freedom."
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Abstract: On Christmas Eve, 1855, patrollers finally caught up with a group of teenaged slaves who had escaped by wagon from Loudon County, Virginia. But the posse was driven off when Ann Wood, leader of the group, brandished weapons and dared the pursuers to fire. The fugitives continued on to Philadelphia. Although ... More »
A Case of Black and White: White Women Protest the Hiring of Black "Wage-Slaves"
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Abstract: Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile ... More »
"A Clear Signal to Officials of the White South: 'Go Back to Your Old Ways'": Vernon Jordan Argues Against the Nixon Administration's Voting Rights Proposal
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Abstract: The Voting Rights Act of 1965--called "the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history" by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--was enacted in order to force Southern states and localities to allow all citizens of voting age to vote in public elections. ... More »
"A Crowd of Howling Negroes": The Chicago Daily Tribune Reports the Chicago Race Riot, 1919
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Abstract: As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend ... More »
"A Definite and Imperative Need for Legislation Against Discrimination"
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Abstract: The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" ... More »
A Georgia Sharecropper's Story of Forced Labor ca. 1900
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| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: At the turn of the century the group of black women most subject to sexual exploitation and abuse were those who lived under the system of quasi-slavery known as "peonage."Under contract labor laws, which existed in almost every southern state, a laborer who signed a contract and then quit his or her ... More »
"A Heritage of Scorn": Harper Urges A Color-Blind Cause
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Abstract: The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned ... More »
"A Jubilee of Freedom": Freed Slaves March in Charleston, South Carolina, March, 1865
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Abstract: At the Civil War's end, enslaved people responded in a variety of ways to take their freedom. One meaning of freedom can be glimpsed in the following report from Charleston, South Carolina, published in the New York Daily Tribune on April 4, 1865, just a few days before General Robert E. Lee's surrender ... More »
A map of servitude.
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Abstract: The back of a Louisiana slave named Gordon, photographed in 1863 after he escaped to the Union forces. Whipping was the most common form of punishment on plantations, and slaveowners and overseers whipped slaves with frightening regularity. Slaves could be whipped for almost any pretext: for "not picking ... More »
"A Perfect Hailstorm of Bullets": A Black Sergeant Remembers the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1899
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Abstract: The best-known image of the Spanish-American War is that of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback charging with his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba. But not only was the role of the Rough Riders exaggerated, it also displaced attention from the black soldiers who made up almost 25 percent of the U. S. force ... More »
A Quaker Abolitionist Travels Through Maryland and Virginia: The Journal of John Woolman, 1757
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Abstract: In both Britain and the United States, Quakers were among the first to denounce slavery in the 18th century. This was due to the efforts of Quaker abolitionist leaders such as John Woolman. Born in New Jersey in 1720, Woolman was a tailor and shopkeeper. Continual encounters with slavery in his own neighborhood--notably ... More »
A renaissance of jazz and poetry
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| Type: | Course Related Materials |
Abstract: The Harlem Renaissance was the birth of a creative plethora in all fields of art for African Americans. The poetry and jazz composed during or inspired by this era naturally complemented each other. Furthermore, many of the themes from the musical and literary worlds are universal and provide a great ... More »
A Word of Warning: A Former Slave Urges Constitutional Caution
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Abstract: The South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895 completed the process of disenfranchising African-Americans (and many poor whites). The state's restrictive policies began with the election law of 1882 that used an intricate system of eight ballot boxes to discourage illiterate white and black residents ... More »
A Year's Wage for Three Peaches: A Black Man Tells of Exploitation in the Late 19th century South
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Abstract: The harsh brutality of race relations in the late nineteenth-century South was sometimes best expressed through small incidents. For William Robinson, the story that best encapsulated his own experience growing up African-American in rural Georgia in the 1880s involved three peaches. He was interviewed ... More »
Actions speak louder than words.
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Abstract: "The Land of Liberty" was the ironic title of this cartoon published in an 1847 edition of the British satirical weekly Punch . As the cartoon suggests, Americans faced a number of dilemmas and crises that came to revolve around the institution of slavery and its expansion into the West. As slavery ... More »
Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South Carolina
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Abstract: In November 1865 a group of 52 black delegates met in Charleston's Zion Church to formulate a position regarding their future in the still uncertain world of the post-emancipation South. Their address invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to claim full rights of citizenship for themselves, ... More »
"Aint I A Woman": Reminiscences of Sojourner Truth Speaking
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Abstract: Isabelle Van Wagenen was born enslaved in New York State and became a well-known abolitionist speaker under the name Sojourner Truth after gaining her freedom in 1827. She moved to New York City where she engaged in evangelical and other reform activities; at various points she also lived in several ... More »
"Almost Broken Spirits": Farmers in the New South
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Abstract: In the decades following the Confederacy's 1865 defeat and the abolition of racial slavery, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded the coming of a "New South" economic order. Freed from the plantation system, the South would enter the modern age, building factories to ... More »
