African American Studies Commons^™

The Negro In California Before 1890, A. Odell Thurman

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Because so little has been written concerning the Negro in California and because the dynamic and romantic sequences in the development of this country have always interested me, I have become interested in knowing what part the Negro, free and slave, played in this panorama of events. Were there Negroes with early expeditions? To what extent did they migrate to the West when "gold fever" had become a nation-wide epidemic? Did they find gold? Where did they settle? What did they do? What difficulty did they encounter politically, socially, and economically? These are questions that have filled my mind, and …

Cummings Guest House Register Pages 023 And 024, Usm African American Collection

We Exist Series 4: Cummings Guest House Register Excerpts

This is a detail from the Cummings Guest House Register. You can see a digital version of the full text HERE.

Cummings Guest House Register Pages 025 And 026, Usm African American Collection

We Exist Series 4: Cummings Guest House Register Excerpts

This is a detail from the Cummings Guest House Register. You can see a digital version of the full text HERE.

The Negro In Literature, A. W. Arnaud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the development of the Negro in American literature from its origins in the spirituals through the flowering of the "New Negro" Renaissance of the early twentieth century. Arnaud opens by defining literature as the artistic record of a people's inner life and argues that Negro literary expression developed first through song, tracing the movement from oral spirituals through the early poetry of the enslaved and freed population toward increasingly sophisticated literary forms.

The thesis presents Paul Laurence Dunbar as the foremost early exponent of Negro poetry, examining his biography and his work in both classic English verse …

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Poets: Paul Laurence Dunbar • Joseph S. Cotter, Sr • James Weldon Johnson • William Edward Burghardt Du Bois • William Stanley Braithwaite • James Edward Mccall • Angelina Weld Grimke • Anne Spencer • Mary Effie Lee Newsome • John Frederick Matheus • Fenton Johnson • Jessie Fauset • Alice Dunbar Nelson • Georgia Douglas Johnson • Claude McKay • Jean Toomer • Joseph S. Cotter, Jr • Blanche Taylor Dickinson • Frank Horne • Lewis Alexander • Sterling A. Brown • Clarissa Scott Delany • Langston Hughes • Gwendolyn B. Bennett • Anna Bontemps • Albert Rice • …

Color, Countee Cullen

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Color (1925), his first published book of poetry, confronts head-on what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the 20th century—the problem of the color line.” The work includes 72 poems, such as the following:

Incident (For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, …

Cummings Guest House Register Pages 002 And 003, Usm African American Collection

We Exist Series 4: Cummings Guest House Register Excerpts

This is a detail from the Cummings Guest House Register. You can see a digital version of the full text HERE.

Cummings Guest House Register Pages 004 And 005, Usm African American Collection

We Exist Series 4: Cummings Guest House Register Excerpts

No abstract provided.

Cummings Guest House Register (Full), Usm African American Collection

Cummings Guest House Register

The Cummings family of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, ran a guest house from 1923 until 1993. Register in which guests signed themselves in or were signed in by staff at the Cummings Guest House, 110 Portland Ave., Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Includes signatures of family members who attended reunions after the Guest House ceased operation.

Date Range:

1923-1998

Size of Collection:

1 ft.

Provenance:

The Cummings Guest House Register belonged to the Cummings Guest House, in operation in Old Orchard Beach ME from 1923 into the 1990s. It was purchased by the University of Southern Maine’s Glickman Library, with some …

Eastern Maine Real Estate Company Meeting Minutes; May 25, 1911 - Dec 26, 1917, Eastern Maine Real Estate Company

Eastern Real Estate Company Archives

Meeting minutes from the Eastern Maine Real Estate Company, covering May 25, 1911 through December 26, 1917.

Cabinet Photograph Of Millie [And] Christine, "The Two Headed Nightingale," N.D., Ollivier

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Cabinet card is 6.5in (16.5cm) tall and 4.5in (11cm) wide. Millie and Christine are photographed in full portrait, each in fine clothes and shoes, each grasping the curtains that frame them in the photographer's studio. Christine, presumably the figure on the right, hold a fan in her right hand.

Fictional Advertisement, An Illustration From "Tom Clifton...." By Warren Lee Goss, 1892: "Gang Of 25 Sea Island Cotton And Rice Negroes", Warren Lee Goss

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

This item was originally created and disseminated as an illustration in the novel Tom Clifton, or, Western boys in Grant and Sherman's army, '61-'65, by Warren Lee Goss, published in 1892. The advertisement appeared on an unnumbered page in chapter 7.

This is a fictional advertisement for a sale of 25 enslaved people in Charleston, S.C. at Ryan's Mart on Chalmers Street, September 25, 1852.

Carte-De-Visite Photograph: "2 Headed Girl, Millie Crissie," No Date., J. H. Fitzgibbon

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy in full portrait. Date of photograph unknown (likely ca. 1870, subjects died 1912).

Six Military And Patriotic Illustrated Songs. Elaborately Colored. In A Novel Form. Series No. 1., Charles Magnus, John F. Poole, W. J. Florence, George P. Holt, Daniel Decatur Emmett, Tony Pastor, Dan Bryant

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

This publication contains the lyrics to six songs, each accompanied by a color illustration, and an advertisement on the last page.

1. Our Grandfathers' Days

2. The Captain with his Whiskers

3. Want — A Substitute

4. Dixie's Land

5. Young American and ould Ireland

6. Kingdom Coming

Receipt To C. Sareon For Loss Of His Slave, Hooker, To Employment In The Confederate Army, South Carolina. Columbia, February, 1864., South Carolina

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Instrument indicating Sareon received $1250 from S.C. for having Hooker, his slave, build military fortifications in the state.

Runaway Slave Broadside From Clay County, Missouri, Dated July 14, 1860., Gideon Thompson

Documents Related to Slavery

RANAWAY

FROM the residence of the undersigned, one mile north of Barry, Clay county, Mis- souri, on the night of the 13th inst., a mulatto negro girl named

VERCILLA,

aged about 17 years, weighs about 135 lbs., and has a scar on her left jaw. ..A liberal reward will be given for the delivery of said negro girl to me, or her confinement so that I can get her

GIDEON THOMPSON. Clay Co., Mo., July 14, 1860.

Sworn Oath To Not Provide Liquor To Enslaved Persons; Liquor License., B. H. Teague, Aiken, Barnwell District, South Carolina

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

John F. Cutter attests to not provide or sell liquor to any enslaved persons. Aiken, Barnwell District, South Carolina, 1859.

The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Frederick Douglass based this story on the real-life heroism of Madison Washington, who led the largest successful slave revolt in U.S. history in 1841. His story is told through the eyes and words of two white men. First, Mr. Listwell from Ohio sees Madison enslaved in Virginia, then a fugitive in Ohio, and finally a recaptured returnee bound from Richmond to the slave markets of New Orleans. Lastly, Tom Grant, the mate on the slave transport Creole, describes the ship’s takeover by its human cargo and its passage to the British Bahamas, where 128 men and women stepped out of …

An Address To The Slaves Of The United States Of America, Henry Highland Garnet

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Brethren and Fellow-Citizens :

Your brethren of the north, east, and west have been accustomed to meet together in National Conventions, to sympathize with each other, and to weep over your unhappy condition. In these meetings we have addressed all classes of the free, but we have never until this time, sent a word of consolation and advice to you. We have been contented in sitting still and mourning over your sorrows, earnestly hoping that before this day, your sacred liberties would have been restored. But, we have hoped in vain. Years have rolled on, and tens of thousands have …

The Past And The Present Condition, And The Destiny, Of The Colored Race, Henry Highland Garnet

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Henry Highland Garnet’s 1848 address to the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, New York, published that year, is an eloquent survey and reclaiming for the race of its share in the Western intellectual tradition. That the ancient Egyptians were Africans, that the Song of Solomon was addressed to an African woman, that the Ethiopians warriors were celebrated by Homer, that Moses’ wife was Ethiopian, that Hannibal, Terence, Euclid, Cyprian, Origen, and Augustine all were of African ancestry—these facts are adduced by Garnet to suggest both the heritage and the potential achievements of the Africans in America. Gar-net surveys the origin …

Slave Trade Ledger Of William James Smith, 1844-1854, William James Smith

Local History

This ledger meticulously details the prices paid and received for scores of human beings (as slaves; only first names are recorded), as well as the expenses incurred by Smith in undertaking this business venture, such as feeding, clothing, sheltering, and nursing the people he purchased and sold. The details of the book illustrate that Smith took several "trips" between 1844 and 1854 to buy and sell slaves: detailed records of purchases and sales of "Negroes" exist for all of the years between 1844 and 1854. The listing of expenses for the year of 1844 (the most complete account) indicate that …

Liquor License, Barnwell District, South Carolina, August 21, 1841., Barnwell District, South Carolina

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

In which the licensee, William Robertson Jr., swears to not "sell give exchange barter" liquor to any enslaved persons. Signed by C.A. Scott.

An Appeal In Favor Of That Class Of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child, Paul Royster (Editor)

Electronic Texts in American Studies

The roots of white supremacy lie in the institution of negro slavery. From the 15th through the 19th century, white Europeans trafficked in abducted and enslaved Africans and justified the practice with excuses that seemed somehow to reconcile the injustice with their professed Christianity. The United States was neither the first nor the last nation to abolish slavery, but its proclaimed principles of freedom and equality were made ironic by the nation’s reluctance to extend recognition to all Americans.

“Americans” is what Mrs. Child calls those fellow countrymen of African ancestry; citizenship and equality are what she proposed beyond simple …

Walker’S Appeal, In Four Articles; Together With A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens Of The World, … (Boston, 1830), David Walker, Paul Royster , Editor & Depositor

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Walker’s Appeal ... is a radical antislavery and antiracist manifesto by a free American of African ancestry. Its bold denunciation of European culture was unprecedented, unrestrained, and startling, viz.:

“The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.”

Walker attacks the slave system and its rampant racism from the viewpoint of America’s allegiance to the idea of freedom; he quotes the Declaration of Independence at length, and strikes a recognizably jeremiad note:

“O Americans! Americans!! I call God—I call angels— I call men, to witness, that your destruction …

List Of Enslaved People, Including Their Ages, At Spring Garden Plantation, Florida, 1829., Spring Garden Plantation

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

This item is a list of over 80 enslaved people of African descent at Spring Garden, a plantation in present-day DeLeon Springs State Park, Florida. The list notes the first names of enslave persons and their ages. Annotations indicate occupations and work assignments, family units, and if individuals were sent to Charleston or sold locally. The meaning of some annotations are unclear or at least not explicit, such as small circles next to females' names. Annotations indicate this list was used as reference more than once. One pair of twins is noted as are several infants. Reference to the names …

An Oration On The Abolition Of The Slave Trade; Delivered In The African Church In The City Of New-York, January 1, 1808, Peter Williams Jr

Zea E-Books in American Studies

The United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, prohibited Congress from banning the importation of slaves until the year 1808. A bill to do this was first introduced in Congress by Senator Stephen Roe Bradley of Vermont in December 1805, and its passage was recommended by President Jefferson in his annual message to Congress in December 1806. In March 1807, Congress passed the legislation, and President Thomas Jefferson signed it into law on March 3, 1807. Subsequently, on March 25, 1807, the British Parliament also passed an act banning the slave trade aboard British ships. The effective date of the …

The Nature And Importance Of True Republicanism With A Few Suggestions Favorable To Independence: A Discourse, Delivered At Rutland, (Vermont,) The Fourth Of July, 1801. — It Being The 25th Anniversary Of American Independence., Lemuel Haynes, Paul Royster , Ed.

Electronic Texts in American Studies

This intriguing document is a political 4th of July “discourse” by an African American New England Congregational ordained minister and Revolutionary War veteran from the very early years of the Republic. Lemuel Haynes’ personal history is an interesting story, as is his assessment of the progress, needs, and future prospects of the new nation. Ostensibly and formally, the discourse is about selecting leadership dedicated to serving the public welfare and avoiding men who seek office for personal preferment, power, or fame. Taking a text from the gospel of Luke, Haynes applies the advice of Jesus to his disciples to the …

Letter From Josiah Masters To John Reade About An Enslaved Man Named Dick Whom (Masters) Wishes To Sell. New York, 1796., Josiah Masters

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Masters writes to Reade that Dick "has been somewhat uneasy with me, the first cause [was] my separating his wench from him."

"The lowest price is one hundred pounds."

Addressed to Reade in Poughkeepsie, NY.

An Address To The Negroes In The State Of New-York, Jupiter Hammon

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Hammon’s Address, published in New York and Philadelphia in 1787, is a simple but eloquent set of Christian advice and reflections. To his fellow Negroes who are enslaved, Hammon advises obedience to masters, honesty and faithfulness, and the avoidance of profaneness. Among his strongest recommendations is that Negroes make every effort learn to read and use that knowledge to study the Bible. Hammon’s focus is on eternity, judgment, redemption, and God’s governance of the world.

Yet Hammon’s appeal is no apology for the slave system, but rather a modulated and astute assessment of the social and power relations between blacks …

Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts On The Illegality Of Slave-Keeping; Wherein Those Arguments That Are Used In Its Vindication Are Plainly Confuted. Together With An Humble Address To Such As Are Concerned In The Practice., Lemuel Haynes, Paul Royster , Ed.

Electronic Texts in American Studies

This is a regularized text of a private sermon or pamphlet manuscript, authored by a 23-year-old African American who had served in the “minuteman” militia and the Continental Army, and who became an ordained minister and was pastor to white Congregational churches for more than 50 years.

Haynes’ tract is an important and revelatory addition to the early anti-slavery literature in the American colonies. Only identified and published in 1983, it is uniquely situated at the crossroads of independence, anti-­slavery, Congregationalism, and African-American identity. Brought to light by Ruth Bogin, the work is testimony to the diversity of thought and …