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.
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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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…
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Aimé Césaire, 1939
From the long poem first published in Volontés in 1939 — the founding text of Négritude, written by a colonial subject of Martinique on his way back from Paris. Both an …
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James Weldon Johnson, 1900
James Weldon Johnson's 1900 hymn, set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson. Adopted as the Black National Anthem by the NAACP in 1919. Three stanzas of memory, …
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