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.
Marcus Garvey, 1923
From the first volume of Philosophy and Opinions, edited by Amy Jacques Garvey in 1923. Garvey's pan-Africanist program — the redemption of Africa as the precondition fo…
Read →
Thomas Sankara, 1984
Sankara's October 4, 1984 address to the U.N. General Assembly, given two months after he renamed Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (Land of Upright People). A young president…
Read →
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 …
Read →
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…
Read →
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…
Read →
C.L.R. James, 1938
James's 1938 history of the Haitian Revolution opens with the argument that the only successful slave revolt in modern history was not an aberration but the leading edge…
Read →
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1986
From the title essay of Decolonising the Mind. Ngũgĩ argues that the choice of language for the African writer is not a stylistic matter but a political one — that to wr…
Read →
Sarah Parker Remond, 1859
Sarah Parker Remond was an African-American abolitionist who spent the late 1850s on a speaking tour of Britain and Ireland, addressing audiences on the conditions of sl…
Read →
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…
Read →
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…
Read →
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,…
Read →
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…
Read →