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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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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W.E.B. Du Bois, 1900
Du Bois's address closing the first Pan-African Conference, London, July 1900. The line 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line' originate…
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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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Amílcar Cabral's address 'National Liberation and Culture' frames culture as both the terrain of colonization and the weapon by which colonized peoples reconstitute them…
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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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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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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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