The archive
Texts the dominant story under-stocked. Filterable by region, era, and theme. Public-domain works are reproduced in full; in-copyright works are excerpted with source links.
Patrice Lumumba, 1960
Lumumba's unplanned reply at the Congolese independence ceremony, after King Baudouin had delivered a paternalistic speech praising Leopold II. Lumumba, prime minister, …
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Kwame Nkrumah, 1965
Nkrumah's 1965 thesis that political independence in Africa, without economic sovereignty, produces a new form of imperial control — exercised through capital, debt, and…
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Amílcar Cabral, 1970
Cabral's 1970 address at Syracuse University — the Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture — naming culture as the soil from which armed liberation grows and the ground on whi…
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Martin Luther King Jr., 1963
King's open letter from a Birmingham jail cell, April 16, 1963, written in response to eight white Alabama clergy who had urged him to slow down. The letter is now in th…
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Malcolm X, 1964
Malcolm X's April 3, 1964 address at Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland. Delivered weeks after his break with the Nation of Islam and weeks before his Mecca pilgrimage. Th…
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Aimé Césaire, 1950
From Discourse on Colonialism (1950): Césaire's argument that the atrocities Hitler brought home to Europe were the same atrocities Europe had practiced in its colonies,…
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Steve Biko, 1978
Biko's 1971 essay defining Black Consciousness — not as a programme for replacing white rule with Black rule, but as the prior work of freeing the colonized mind to imag…
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Edward W. Said, 1978
The opening of Said's 1978 book, which named — and reorganized around — the Western academic and literary apparatus that produces 'the Orient' as a category of European …
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Cheikh Anta Diop, 1974
Diop's argument, defended at his 1960 Sorbonne doctoral examination and reissued in English in 1974, that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization — and that the s…
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