Black Lives in Archives

Note: John Merrick co-founded and served as president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and Mechanic and Farmer’s Bank in Durham. Born in Sampson County in 1859, the son of a enslaved mother. Merrick became a brick mason in Raleigh, where he worked on the construction of Shaw University. In 1943 the U.S. Navy commissioned a merchant ship out of the Wilmington naval yards as the SS John Merrick.

Note: "This little book presents views showing property owned and controlled exclusively by Negroes in the city of Durham, N.C. ..."--Introd. (p. 1), signed: Oliver B. Quick. Published to display the progress of African Americans in Durham

Note: Publication of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. Often highlights the achievements of the company and its employees.

Note: Authored by lawyer, activist, gender equality advocate, and author Pauli Murray, this biography memoir chronicles Murray’s upbringing in Durham as a descendant of the Fitzgerald family. In 1977 Murray became the first African American woman to be appointed a priest in the Episcopal church.

Note: Collection of 16 fans distributed to congregation members of the St. Joseph African Methodist Episcopal Church founded in Durham, N.C., in 1869 and one of the oldest African American churches in Durham.

Note: This Scrapbook compiled by Elna B. Spaulding details personal accomplishments and work with the Women-In-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes organization, which was founded in 1968 that worked for women’s rights. Spaulding was an activist for civil rights for minorities and women and had a notable career in local politics.

Notes: August Wilson was an African American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of ten plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century.

Notes: Black Panther artist Dwayne Turner is an African American illustrator and comic book artist. Working for both Marvel and DC comics in the late 1980s and 1990s, Turner transitioned from comics to the gaming industry in 2006.

Notes: Carrie Mae Weems has carefully staged the photographs in this series to suggest moments of everyday life First exhibited in 1990, the Kitchen Table Series set the stage for future contemporary artists to explore issues of identity.

Notes: Two examples of Onitsha Market Literature published in Nigeria, primarily in the 1960s. The important role of Onitsha Market Literature in detailing what Chinua Achebe describes as the "social problems of a somewhat mixed-up but dynamic, even brash, modernizing community. Included in the collection are stories, plays, advice and moral discourses that were all published by local presses in the 1960s in the market town of Onitsha on the Niger River in southeastern Nigeria. Emmanuel Obiechina, a prominent scholar of Onitsha market literature, argues that this African popular literature is "an integral, if unique and startling, part of the West African creative scene.

Notes: Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971, Mickalene Thomas earned her BFA in painting at Pratt Institute in 2000 and an MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002. This volume is the first to gather together her various approaches to photography, including portraits, collages, Polaroids and other processes. The work is a personal act of deconstruction and reappropriation.

Notes: A series of illustrated poetry collections by Dunbar, "an important predecessor to the younger generation of poets of the Harlem Renaissance," The images accompanying Dunbar's eight poems in Poems of Cabin and Field were collectively made by "faculty members of the Hampton Institute Camera Club, most of them well-connected white Northerners," whose staged photographs were "largely made in African American communities in the environs of Hampton, Virginia."

Pictures of Poro College, Black cosmetology school founded by Annie Turnbo Malone

Notes: One of the nation's wealthiest African Americans was Annie Malone, founder and owner of Poro College (watch video below), a cosmetics firm (view products below) that started in St. Louis and later occupied an entire city block in Chicago. Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone was an African-American businesswoman, educator, inventor and philanthropist. Annie was two years younger than Madam C. J. Walker. She had launched her hair care business four years before Sarah Breedlove (later known as Madam C. J. Walker). In the early 1900s Madam Walker worked as a "Poro Agent" for Annie for about one year. In the first three decades of the 20th century, she founded and developed a large and prominent commercial and educational enterprise centered around cosmetics for African-American women.

First British publication of Hansberry's play

Notes: A Raisin in the Sun, drama in three acts by Lorraine Hansberry, first published and produced in 1959. The play’s title is taken from “Harlem,” a poem by Langston Hughes. A Raisin in the Sun follows a poor black family that receives $10,000 from a life insurance policy after the father’s death. Instead of providing salvation, the money causes intense disagreements over what should be done with it.

Notes: A Soldier's Play is a play by American playwright Charles Fuller. Set on a US Army installation in the segregation-era South. The drama won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, among other accolades. It was the basis for a 1984 feature film adaptation, A Soldier's Story, for which Fuller wrote the screenplay.

Notes: Static is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by Milestone Comics, an independently-owned imprint of DC Comics founders Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. Static's civilian identity, Virgil Hawkins, was named after Virgil D. Hawkins, a black man who was denied entrance to the University of Florida's law school due to his race in 1949. Virgil Hawkins was fifteen years old when he became Static.

Notes: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 American blaxploitation film written, co-produced, scored, edited, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles. The film tells the picaresque story of a poor black man fleeing from the white police authorities. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Note: A pamphlet including Birth control pills and black children / a statement by the Black Unity Party (Peekskill N.Y.) -- A response / by black sisters -- Poor black women / by Patricia Robinson.

Note: A selection of the lectures that Professor Angela Y. Davis gave in her “Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature course at UCLA during the fall quarter of 1969.

Note: A Voice from the South (1892) is the only book published by one of the most prominent African American women scholars and educators of her era. In it, she engages a variety of issues ranging from women's rights to racial progress, from segregation to literary criticism.She became the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree, earning a PhD in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

Note: Audre Lorde, Black lesbian feminist, co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. In #2 of the Freedom Organizing Pamphlet Series, "an African American and an Asian American poet make the connections between South African apartheid and North American racism. I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities is a printed version of a lecture delivered by Lorde at Medgar Evers College in NYC. The acclaimed author challenges homophobia as a divisive force, particularly among Black women.

Note: Lorde’s work describes the relationship between South African Apartheid and American racism. Woo discusses divestment of US corporations and holdings in South Africa and the turn of attention to eliminating racism worldwide. They connect the largely unchecked white supremacy of both countries and note the rise of freedom fighting by Black and people of color that emerges as a counter to that supremacy.

Notes: Both published works are part of the Robert A. Hill Collection. Hill is a noted scholar of the Black Diaspora who primarily researches the life of Marcus Garvey and his global Pan-Africanist movement. Ethel M. Collins was a Jamaican born activist served as secretary-general of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Black nationalist organization founded by Garvey to promote these ideals. Collins briefly served as president of the UNIA after Garvey’s death in 1940. Elinor Robinson White was a Garvey loyalist from Robbins Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. An officer in the Chicago Garvey Club in the 1920s and early 1930s, she served as a delegate to the 1929 and 1934 conventions in Kingston and the 1937 and 1938 UNIA convention in Toronto. She was among those chosen by Garvey to participate in the "School of African Philosophy" sessions he taught for a small group following the 1937 convention.

Note: This work is co-authored by Ida B. Wells and this a written, self-published response to the lack of representation of the Black experience, African American and African Diapora, at the 1893 World’s Fair. Wells was a well known journalist and activist of the late 19th and early 20th century, writing about advocating for anti-lynching legislation, women’s and Black rights.

Note: In this volume of poetry, activist poet Lizelia Moorer, a teacher at South Carolina’s first black college, presents a sweeping portrayal of the nature of racial oppression. She confronts lynching, debt peonage, rape, segregation, and the hypocrisy of the church.

Biographies of Lucy Craft Laney, Maggie Lena Walker, Julie Porter Barrett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Jane Edna Hunter.

Note: This book profiles significant African American women of the early 20th century who built institutions for the African American community. The dust jacket features the artwork of Lois Mailou Jones.

By former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams

Novel by Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams under the pen name Selena Montgomery

Note: In February of 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba, a center for the slave trade. Two Spanish plantation owners, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, purchased 53 Africans and put them aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad to ship them to a Caribbean plantation. On July 1, 1839, the Africans seized the ship, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered Montes and Ruiz to sail to Africa. August 24, 1839, the Amistad was seized off Long Island, NY, by the U.S. brig Washington. The schooner, its cargo, and all on board were taken to New London, CT. In the trial before the Supreme Court, the Africans were represented by former U.S. President, and descendant of American revolutionaries, John Quincy Adams. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, stating that they were free individuals. Kidnapped and transported illegally, they had never been slaves. The Court ordered the immediate release of the Amistad Africans. Thirty five of the survivors were returned to their homeland (the others died at sea or in prison while awaiting trial).

Note: Pamphlet advertising the first ships launched by the Black Star Line, Inc. and asking for potential investors to purchase stocks in the corporation. The Black Star Line was the vision of Jamaican born Marcus Garvey, activist and pan-Africanist who led a global movement to unite people of African descent. The conception of Black Star Line was a ship line that would assist African Americans with migrating to Africa to escape oppression and create a settlement in Africa. The BSL never materialized and the fundraising that was done on its behalf, in part led to Garvey being expedited from the US on the charge of mail fraud.

Note: Prince Saunders was born in Boston and studied at Dartmouth. He became a proponent of emigration of African Americans to Haiti after the country’s war for independence in 1796. Saunders would become adviser to Emperor Henri Christophe. The work is a translation of the laws of Haiti with commentary and notes.

Note: The book describes Equiano's time spent in enslavement, and documents his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his eventual success in gaining his own freedom and in business thereafter. He was born in the Kingdom of Benin. Benin was a part of Guinea.

Note: Lunsford Lane was born a slave in 1803 in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his mother was a slave in the master’s city house (and his father enslaved on a nearby plantation). After selling a basket of peaches as a boy, he realized the opportunities offered by profit-making ventures.

Full title: Narrative of Sojourner Truth : a northern slave, emancipated from bodily servitude by the state of New York, in 1828 : with a portrait.

Note: Sojourner Truth (1795-1883) was originally a Dutch-speaking slave in Hurley, New York (Ulster County) who became one of the nineteenth century's most eloquent voices for the causes of anti-slavery and women's rights. Moving to New York City, she became involved in Evangelical religious and moral reform activities and began preaching at camp-meetings around the city. By 1832, she had come under the influence of the self-styled utopian prophet, Matthias, whom she helped to support with her savings and labor.

Note: Martin Robison Delany was born free on May 6, 1812, in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia). His father, Samuel, was an enslaved carpenter, his mother, Pati, a free seamstress whose parents were African and, according to some accounts, of royal heritage. In 1856, Delany moved to Canada with his wife, Catherine, whom he married in 1843, and his children. He briefly dabbled in the politics of Liberia and during the Civil War helped to recruit and organize black soldiers in the Union army. Commissioned a major in 1865 after meeting with U.S. president Abraham Lincoln at the White House, Delany became the U.S. Army’s first black field officer.

Subtitle: a record of facts, authentic narratives, letters, &c., narrating the hardships, hair-breadth escapes, and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom, as related by themselves and others or witnessed by the author : together with sketches of some of the largest stockholders and most liberal aiders and advisers of the road

Note: Presents an account of the economic and political status of blacks in the United States. Because of the intractable nature of U.S. racism, Delany concluded by recommending emigration of African Americans to Central America. Some years later Delany turned to Africa as the better choice for relocation of black Americans. The report of the Niger Valley exploring party provides clear information on the conditions in West Africa of that time.

Notes: Founded in January 1859 by African American New York–based journalist and book publisher Thomas Hamilton, the Anglo-African Magazine was a key site of African American literary production and political debate. Its list of regular contributors included some of the most celebrated African American writers of the 19th century: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Martin Delany, James McCune Smith, Daniel Alexander Payne, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sarah Mapps Douglass. It hoped to create a safe space in which the black public could voice its opinions and concerns without fear of white censure. Six months after the founding of the Anglo-African Magazine, Hamilton introduced its newspaper offshoot, entitled the Weekly Anglo-African. He published the magazine until March 1860, after which its publication was indefinitely suspended, but the weekly ran until March 1861.

Notes: Student-run literary magazine authored by creators at the Atlanta University Center. The AUC, as it’s commonly known, is comprised of five historically Black universities and colleges in Atlanta: Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark University, and Morris Brown College.

Notes: The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The BPP newspaper became the number 1 Black Weekly newspaper from 1968-1971, selling over 300,000 each week. It contained both national and international news. The paper often featured the work of noted artist Emory Douglas, whose visual art and illustration became a fixture of the publication.

Notes: Drum and Spear bookstore was founded in 1968 in Washington DC by veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Charlie Cobb, Curtis Hayes, Judy Richardson and Courtland Cox. D+S was a haven and meeting place for the DC Black community, a location where Black authored books were sold and Black thinkers would often give lectures and readings. At one point, D+S was the largest Black bookstore in the US and expanded into publishing books as well through Drum and Spear Press; a second store and press was also opened in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in the early 1970s. Drum and Spear closed in 1974 due to financial difficulties.

Comic book published by Africa Rising, member of ANIA, an association of Black independent comic book publishers

Comic book published by Afrocentric Comic Books, member of ANIA, an association of Black independent comic book publishers.

Notes: Heru, Son of Ausar combined elements of African religious traditions and symbolism with the 90’s era depiction of modern African leaders and role models. Not all of the stories were set in the United States either. Heru took place in Kemet, the African name for Egypt in days of old, for instance.

Notes: Published under the ANIA comic imprint founded by Nabile Hage, Roger Barnes, and Roosevelt Pitt in 1993. Ebony Warrior and Heru were part of a wave of Black authored comic book titles from that period. ANIA is taken from a Swahili word meaning “defend” or “fight for”, and it wasn’t one organization but rather a combination of six separate African-American-owned publishing arms. ACB Comics, Hype Comics, Up Comics, Dark Zulu Lies, Omega 7, and Africa Rising all joined forces under the ANIA banner with the intention of moving their stories, featuring Afrocentric heroes and mythology, out of niche stores catering to Black interests and into mainstream comic shops.

Notes: Freedom’s Journal was the first African American owned and operated newspaper in the United States. A weekly four column publication printed every Friday, Freedom’s Journal was founded by free born African Americans John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish on March 16, 1827 in New York City, New York. Russwurm and Cornish placed great value on the need for reading and writing as keys to empowerment for the black population and they hoped a black newspaper would encourage literacy and intellectual development among African Americans. The paper’s support of colonization, however, was unpopular with its readers and subscriptions began to decline. With the loss of circulation in March 1829, Freedom’s Journal was forced to cease publication.

Notes: Print by Kennedy with quotation by Thomas Carlyle. Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. is an American printer, book artist and papermaker best known for social and political commentary, particularly in printed posters. Kennedy creates prints, posters and postcards from handset wood and metal type, oil-based inks, and eco-friendly and affordable chipboard. Many of the posters are inspired by proverbs, sayings, and quotes Kennedy locates or potential clients provide.Using hand presses, he “produces large editions of wildly colourful, typographically-driven posters on inexpensive chipboard stock, posters which are often so riotously layered with vibrant colours of ink as to retain a wet iridescence and tackiness years after they were printed. His working method often involves overprinting multiple layers of text ...resulting in no two prints being truly identical.

This pamphlet outlines the rules of the African Society, a Boston group of African Americans organized to provide a form of health insurance and funeral benefits, as well as spiritual brotherhood, to its members. The last page of the pamphlet lists the members of the African Society.

Notes: Magazine publishing articles by gay and lesbian African Americans in the Raleigh and Durham areas. Out in Black Publications was founded in the summer of 1996 by John Hardy, a graduate of North Carolina State University and writer who lived in Raleigh, North Carolina. He funded, edited, wrote, collected stories, and distributed the free first issue of Out in Black by himself at local night clubs, in bookshops, through word of mouth, and through orders made by anyone who was interested in seeing his work.

Notes: Author describes her family's experience with racism and school integration. As a high school student, the author was named lead plaintiff in Clarissa Thompson et al. v. County School Board of Arlington County (June 1956), a school desegregation class action suit filed in U.S. District Court.“It Wasn’t Little Rock” was the response that black students in Arlington, Virginia often gave when asked about their experiences in the newly racially desegregated public schools of the 1960s. To Arlington students, Central High in Little Rock provided the standard for what they might face when integrating their county’s formerly all white schools.