In a time of division, we can have no better prophetic voice to frame today's discussions of justice and freedom than a one-legged fugitive slave who came to a Capitol without a Dome to tell how the Constitution could be made more perfect, in the name of God." —from a letter sent by the President of the Presbyterian Historical Society to the President of the Maryland State Senate In February 1865, just days after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery, Presbyterian pastor and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet spoke before the U.S. Congress, becoming the first African American to do so. Garnet's speech, titled "Let the Monster Perish," celebrated the end of slavery and pleaded with humanity to never let it rise again. Garnet's address would later set the tone for Congressional Reconstruction, providing the important and necessary perspective from those whose voices had been excluded from American democracy. His address is reproduced here along with a time line of his life.
The rage of blacks in slavery-era America is not something we today must merely imagine: we can read their angry words in documents like these. David Walker, born to a free black woman, was by the 1820s a leading black intellectual and a proponent of black unity as a necessary precursor to throwing off the shackles of slavery. His Appeal, published in 1829, warned of a violent and bloody slave insurgency, and startled even abolitionists with its vehemence. He was rehabilitated by Henry Highland Garnet two decades later, when he-a runaway slave since childhood-republished it, in the single 1848 volume of which this is a replica, along with his own Address to the Slaves of the United States of America. Garnet's call for massive slave uprisings had been similarly rebuffed several years earlier, but worsening tensions between the North and the South, and between slave owners and abolitionists, created an atmosphere in which rising militancy was more welcome. In their passionate writings, the bitter wrath of Walker and Garnet echoes across the decades, reminders of the shameful past that continues to haunt America as a nation to this day.
In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as Civil Disobedience is a significant and widely admired contribution to abolitionist literature, as well as an anti-war tract, but Thoreau’s focus is less on political organization and solidarity than it is on personal choice and individual responsibility. Cultivating personal integrity in the face of political injustice is the project Thoreau defends in Civil Disobedience; this focus has made the work highly influential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century political movements. Bob Pepperman Taylor’s new Introduction explains the work’s specific political context, helping readers to understand the text as Thoreau wrote it. The edition also offers a number of historical documents on Thoreau’s abolitionism; the war with Mexico; and Thoreau’s philosophical development in relation to other thinkers.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Such is the very high esteem which is entertained for the memory of DAVID WALKER, and so general is the desire to preserve his Appeal," that the subscriber has undertaken, and performed the task of re-publication, with a brief notice of his life, having procuredpermission from his widow, Mrs. Dewson. The work is valuable, because it was among the first, and was actually the boldest and most direct appeal in behalf of freedom, which was made in the early part of the Anti-Slavery Reformation. When the history of the emancipation of the bondmen of America shall be written, whatever name shall be placed first on the list of heroes, that of the author of the Appeal will not be second...
In a time of division, we can have no better prophetic voice to frame today's discussions of justice and freedom than a one-legged fugitive slave who came to a Capitol without a Dome to tell how the Constitution could be made more perfect, in the name of God." —from a letter sent by the President of the Presbyterian Historical Society to the President of the Maryland State Senate In February 1865, just days after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery, Presbyterian pastor and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet spoke before the U.S. Congress, becoming the first African American to do so. Garnet's speech, titled "Let the Monster Perish," celebrated the end of slavery and pleaded with humanity to never let it rise again. Garnet's address would later set the tone for Congressional Reconstruction, providing the important and necessary perspective from those whose voices had been excluded from American democracy. His address is reproduced here along with a time line of his life.
Chronicles five hundred years of African-American history from the origins of slavery on the African continent through Barack Obama's second presidential term, examining contributing political and cultural events.
12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest-over ten and a half million-were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge-or deny-their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries-Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru-through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view.
Henry H. Mitchell has completely revised and integrated his popular books The Recovery of Preaching and Black Preaching for seminarians and pastors--both Black and White--who are seeking to add power and vision to their sermons. Mitchell persuasively demonstrates that Black culture and preaching style are vital for the empowerment of Black congregations and have much to offer the preaching method of all preachers. By focusing on the use of storytelling, imagination, and style of preaching rooted in African-American culture, Mitchell spotlights effective techniques for lively preaching.
“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African-American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.” — Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society. It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.
Superb....[A] richly researched, passionately written book."--William E. Cain, Boston Globe Widely acknowledged as the definitive history of the era, Henry Mayer's National Book Award finalist biography of William Lloyd Garrison brings to life one of the most significant American abolitionists. Extensively researched and exquisitely nuanced, the political and social climate of Garrison's times and his achievements appear here in all their prophetic brilliance. Finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Book Prize, winner of the Commonwealth Club Silver Prize for Nonfiction.
Almost one-hundred years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed the notion of the "talented tenth," an African American elite that would serve as leaders and models for the larger black community. In this unprecedented collaboration, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West--two of Du Bois's most prominent intellectual descendants--reassess that relationship and its implications for the future of black Americans. If the 1990s are the best of times for the heirs of the Talented Tenth, they are unquestionably worse for the growing black underclass. As they examine the origins of this widening gulf and propose solutions for it, Gates and West combine memoir and biography, social analysis and cultural survey into a book that is incisive and compassionate, cautionary and deeply stirring. "Today's most public African American intellectual voices...West and Gates have made a valuable contribution."--Julian Bond, Philadelphia Inquirer "Brilliant...a social, cultural and political blueprint...that attempts to illumine the future path for blacks and American democracy."--New York Daily News "Henry Louis Gates., Jr., and Cornel West are among the most renowned American intellectuals of our time."--New York Times Book Review
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