The following are documents which have contributed to the shaping of African American history. These documents are a starting point for additional research and discussions that help further our understanding of the history of people of African ancestry in the United States.
Submitted March 18, 1898. Decided April 25, 1898. PRIOR HISTORY: ERROR TO THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI. At June term 1896 of the Circuit Court of Washington County, Mississippi, the plaintiff in error was indicted by a grand jury composed entirely of … Read More(1898) Williams v. Mississippi
Nineteenth Century black conservative William Hannibal Thomas was a Civil War veteran, Reconstruction era South Carolina politician, and U.S. counsel to Portuguese Southwest Africa (Angola). He is most famous however as the author of the 1901 book, The American Negro: What He Was, What He … Read More(1901) William Hannibal Thomas on the American Negro
Most scholars of today imagine Booker T. Washington as the major accommodationist and black political conservative of the era. There were others including Professor William Hooper Councill, the founder and first president of the Huntsville Normal School which today is Alabama A.A& M University. Councill … Read More(1901) William Hooper Councill’s Letter to the White People of Alabama
In this 1903 article published in The Outlook, a New York magazine, W.E.B. Du Bois, then teaching at Atlanta University, describes his educational philosophy and in the process, contrasts his views with those of the Tuskegee educator Booker T. Washington who was then at the … Read More(1903) W.E.B. Du Bois, “Training Negroes for Social Power”
OPINION IN GUINN v. UNITED STATES JUDGES: White, McKenna, Holmes, Day, Hughes, Van Devanter, Lamar, Pitney; McReynolds took no part in the consideration or decision of this case. OPINION BY: WHITE OPINION: MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the court. This case is … Read More(1915) Guinn v. United States: The Grandfather Clause
Primary Documents: Buchanan v. Warley (1917) Argued April 10, 11, 1916 Reargued April 27, 1917 November 5, 1917 MR. JUSTICE DAY delivered the opinion of the court. Buchanan, plaintiff in error, brought an action in the Chancery Branch of Jefferson Circuit Court of Kentucky for … Read More(1917) Buchanan v. Warley
PREAMBLE The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities’ League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive and expansive society, and is founded by persons desiring to the utmost to work for the general uplift of the Negro peoples of the world. And … Read More(1918) Constitution of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
In July 1918, W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wrote the editorial below titled “Close Ranks” in which he urged African Americans to forget “our special grievances” and support the World … Read More(1918) W.E.B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks,” Editorial from The Crisis
“If We Must Die,” written in 1919 by Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, became for many African Americans an anthem for resistance against the anti-black violence then sweeping the nation. His words appear below. If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and … Read More(1919) “If We Must Die”
In a July 1918 editorial in The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois urged African Americans to set aside their differences with their countrymen over the nation’s treatment of its black citizens and “close ranks” in the war against Imperial Germany and its Allies. Ten months later, … Read More(1919) W.E.B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” Editorial from The Crisis
