Publisher’s Note

Editors’ Introduction to the Second Edition

Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition

Contributors

Volume 1: 1619–1852

John Rolfe’s Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys

Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve According to the Condition of the Mother

Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage

“A Minute Against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting”

Daniel Horsmanden: The New-York Conspiracy

John Woolman’s Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation

Petition of Prince Hall and Other African Americans to the Massachusetts General Court

An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia

Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution

Alexander Falconbridge: An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa

Benjamin Banneker’s Letter to Thomas Jefferson

Fugitive Slave Act of 1793

Richard Allen: “An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice”

Prince Hall: A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge

Ohio Black Code

Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves

Peter Williams, Jr.’s “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”

Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm’s First Freedom’s Journal Editorial

David Walker: Appeal To The Coloured Citizens of the World

State v. Mann

William Lloyd Garrison’s First Liberator Editorial

The Confessions of Nat Turner

United States v. Amistad

Prigg v. Pennsylvania

Henry Highland Garnet: “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”

First Editorial of the North Star

William Wells Brown’s “Slavery As It Is”

Roberts v. City of Boston

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself

Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Frederick Douglass: “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July” Speech

Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States

Volume 2: 1853–1900

Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup

Dred Scott v. Sandford

John S. Rock’s “Whenever the Colored Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions”

Virginia Slave Code

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Osborne P. Anderson: A Voice from Harper’s Ferry

Emancipation Proclamation

Thomas Morris Chester’s Civil War Dispatches

William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15

Black Code of Mississippi

Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Testimony Before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South Against Blacks

Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Henry McNeal Turner’s Speech on His Expulsion from the Georgia Legislature

Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Ku Klux Klan Act

United States v. Cruikshank

Richard Harvey Cain’s “All That We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights”

Civil Rights Cases

T. Thomas Fortune: “The Present Relations of Labor and Capital”

Anna Julia Cooper’s “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race”

John Edward Bruce’s “Organized Resistance Is Our Best Remedy”

John L. Moore’s “In The Lion’s Mouth”

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women”

Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address

Plessy v. Ferguson

Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America”

Volume 3: 1901–1964

George H. White’s Farewell Address to Congress

W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk

W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Trotter: Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles

Theodore Roosevelt’s Brownsville Legacy Special Message to the Senate

Act in Relation to the Organization of a Colored Regiment in the City of New York

Monroe Trotter’s Protest to Woodrow Wilson

Guinn v. United States

William Pickens: “The Kind of Democracy the Negro Expects”

Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States

Cyril Briggs’s Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood

Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”

Marcus Garvey: “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association”

Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro”

James Weldon Johnson’s “Harlem: The Culture Capital”

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot”

John P. Davis: “A Black Inventory of the New Deal”

Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts”

Charles Hamilton Houston’s “Educational Inequalities Must Go!”

Walter F. White’s “U.S. Department of (White) Justice”

Richard Wright: “Blueprint for Negro Writing”

Mary McLeod Bethune’s “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”

A. Philip Randolph’s “Call to Negro America to March on Washington”

Executive Order 9983

Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted”

To Secure These Rights

Sweatt v. Painter

Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad’s Scottsboro Boy

Brown v. Board of Education

Marian Anderson’s My Lord, What a Morning

Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”

George Wallace’s Inaugural Address as Governor

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter From a Birmingham Jail

John F. Kennedy: Report to the American People on Civil Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony at the Democratic National Convention

Volume 4: 1965–2017

Malcolm X: “After the Bombing”

Bond v. Floyd

Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

South Carolina v. Katzenbach

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”

Loving v. Virginia1315

Kerner Commission Report Summary

Eldridge Cleaver: “Education and Revolution”

Jesse Owens: Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man

Clay v. United States

Angela Davis’s “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation”

Jackie Robinson: I Never Had It Made

FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad

Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel

Shirley Chisholm: “The Black Woman in Contemporary America”

Jesse Jackson’s Democratic National Convention Keynote Address

Anita Hill’s Opening Statement at the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Clarence Thomas

Colin Powell’s Commencement Address at Howard University

Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March Pledge

One America in the 21st Century

Clarence Thomas’s Concurrence/Dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger

Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union”

U.S. Senate Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African Americans

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow

Shelby County v. Holder

Movement for Black Lives—Vision for Black Lives

Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department—Report Summary

Cooper v. Harris

Teachers’ Activity Guide

List Of Documents by Category

Acknowledgements