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.
Frederick Douglass, 1852
Douglass's 1852 Rochester address — invited to speak on the meaning of the Fourth of July, he asks instead what the holiday signifies to a people still in chains. One of…
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Ida B. Wells, 1892
Wells's 1892 pamphlet, written after a Memphis mob destroyed her newspaper offices, documenting the actual circumstances of lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South — …
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W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903
Du Bois's 1903 essay arguing that the Black race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men — and that the education of the Black intelligentsia is the…
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Anna Julia Cooper, 1892
From A Voice from the South (1892), the founding document of Black feminist thought in the United States. Cooper argues that no people, no movement, can rise higher than…
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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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W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903
The opening chapter of Du Bois's 1903 classic introduces double consciousness — the felt experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a contemptuous other — and fram…
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Frederick Douglass, 1845
The fight with the slave-breaker Covey, from Chapter X of Douglass's 1845 Narrative. The passage Douglass himself identified as the hinge of his life: 'This battle with …
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Carter G. Woodson, 1933
Woodson's 1933 indictment of the American school system as a machine that trains Black students to admire whiteness and disdain their own history. The 'mis-education' is…
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Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1896
Dunbar's 1896 sonnet, written when the poet was twenty-four and already the most-published Black American poet of his generation. The mask of the title — the public face…
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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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Phillis Wheatley, 1773
Wheatley's eight-line poem, published in her 1773 London collection. Often misread as accommodation; read again, the second quatrain turns sharply: 'Remember, Christians…
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Booker T. Washington, 1901
Washington's 1895 address at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, reprinted as Chapter XIV of his 1901 autobiography. The speech that Du Bois would later name 'the A…
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