Long termed a “race riot,” the turmoil that enveloped Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898 is now called an armed insurrection. White supremacists drove from power all of the black and white elected officials of this predominately African American city in what was believed … Read More(1898) Rev. Charles S. Morris Describes The Wilmington Massacre of 1898
On September 18, 1895 Booker T. Washington gave an address to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition which became known as the “Atlanta Compromise Speech.” The address appears below. Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Board of Directors, and Citizens: One-third of the population of … Read More(1895) Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Compromise Speech”
On May 18, 1893, Anna Julia Cooper delivered an address at the World’s Congress of Representative Women then meeting in Chicago. Cooper’s speech to this predominately white audience described the progress of African American women since slavery. Cooper in many ways epitomized that progress. Born … Read More(1893) Anna Julia Cooper, “Women’s Cause is One and Universal”
John E. Bruce, better known as “Bruce Grit” to the public, was described in 1901 as the “prince of Negro Newspaper correspondents.” He was the author of The Bloody Red Record, a compilation of lynchings in the United States published in 1901. However few people … Read More(1889) John E. Bruce, “Organized Resistance Is Our Best Remedy”
Frederick Douglass was one of the few men present at the pioneer woman’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. His support of women’s rights never wavered although in 1869 he publicly disagreed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony … Read More(1888) Frederick Douglass On Woman Suffrage
Lucy E. Parsons was a leading figure in American anarchism and the radical labor movement. Born a slave near Waco, Texas, she married Albert R. Parsons who had become a white radical Republican after serving first as a Confederate soldier. In 1873 Albert and Lucy … Read More(1886) Lucy Parsons, “I am An Anarchist”
In 1886, T. Thomas Fortune, born enslaved in Florida thirty years earlier, was already a newspaper owner and publisher in New York City and author of Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the Old South (1884), the first significant work to argue that … Read More(1886) T. Thomas Fortune, “The Present Relations of Labor and Capital”
William Henry Crogman, a native of the West Indian island of St. Martin, was educated at Pierce Academy in Massachusetts immediately after the Civil War. In 1868 he was named to the English faculty of newly organized Claflin College in South Carolina. By 1870 Crogman … Read More(1884) William H. Crogman, “Negro Education: Its Helps and Hindrances”
Between 1879 and 1880, six thousand Exodusters left Louisiana and Mississippi for Kansas. Their migration, prompted by the end of racially-integrated Reconstruction governments, by anti-black violence and by sharecropping and tenant farming, brought national attention including a Congressional hearing, and generated a national debate about … Read More(1879) Robert J. Harlan, “Migration is the Only Remedy for Our Wrongs”
Today Ferdinand L. Barnett is best known as the husband of anti-lynching crusader, Ida Wells Barnett. However by 1879, Barnett, a graduate of Chicago’s College of Law and editor the Chicago Conservator, the city’s first black newspaper, which he founded in 1878, was one of … Read More(1879) Ferdinand L. Barnett, “Race Unity”
