African American History Manuscript Collections in the Rubenstein Library

Collection comprises 50 labels from cosmetics intended for African American consumers by the Chicago-based companies Famous Products, Madam Jones, and Valmor Products. All the companies were owned by industrialists Morton and Rose Neumann, a white, Jewish couple from Chicago.

The collection contains over 250 separate press books, campaign books, advertising manuals, supplements and other ephemeral promotional booklets, broadsides or single sheet publications, and posters designed for the use of theater distributors, dating from the independent Black films of the 1920s to 2000. The collection also includes some souvenir program booklets sold at theaters, and two published hardcover books.

Posters, leaflets, and newspaper circulars containing advertisements for minstrel shows, plays, and musicals. With a few exceptions, African-American actors and actresses comprise the casts for the performances.

Frank Silvera was an African-American actor and theatrical director. He founded The American Theatre of Being, a Los Angeles-based theater company dedicated to helping black actors find work.

Griff Davis (1923-1993) was a photojournalist, diplomat, and film maker from Atlanta, Georgia. The collection contains photographic materials and papers related to three photo essays illustrated by Davis. Films in the collection were taken by Davis and include two home movies and six color and black-and-white 16mm films documenting people, politics, and agricultural life in Liberia during William Tubman's presidency in the early 1950s.

Author Linda Dahl wrote the first full-length biography of jazz pianist, arranger, composer, and educator Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981); the Linda Dahl Collection on Mary Lou Williams contains materials compiled by Dahl in researching the Williams biography, including newspaper and magazine clippings, correspondence, photographs and transparency strips, concert programs, and a variety of financial and foundation records.

The Oscar Micheaux Society formed in the early 1990s to promote the study of the early African-American film director, writer, and producer Oscar Micheaux.

Collection includes advertisements, games, sheet music, serial illustrations, and other caricatures of African Americans predominately dating from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. A significant portion of the illustrations were excerpted from news or literature magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Popular Magazine, and Puck magazine.

Thelma Porter was an African-American singer and performer who performed in variety shows with a minstrel group promoted by E.K. Fernandez, a Hawaian showman. Collection contains a photograph album that Porter maintained primarily during performance tours through Hawaii, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Thomas Cripps is a historian specializing in the portrayal of African Americans in film and the history of African Americans in the motion picture industry. Taken as a whole, the films, movie stills, research files, and publication files document Cripps's investigations into representations of racial and ethnic stereotypes in popular culture, particularly in film.

The bulk of the collection consists of Dixon's holograph and typescript drafts of scripts, novels, and corrections for titles he authored including The Clansman, The Birth of a Nation (includes draft play script and film's shot list), The One Woman (bound page proof), the Love Complex, God's Fool: A Drama of Negro Life in Modern Harlem. The bulk of these works depict romanticized, racist, Lost Cause morality plays, with Dixon's texts advocating white supremacy, segregation, violence against Black people, misogyny (and opposing women's suffrage), and miscengeny.

Correspondence, recital programs, sheet music, clippings, business cards, notes, music tablets, publicity materials, bills and receipts, pedagogical materials, and other papers related to Hill's career as an African American coloratura soprano.

The William Grant Still Papers, 1877-1992, contain chiefly photocopies of music, writings, correspondence, diaries, pictures, printed material, clippings, and recordings, which primarily document his work as a composer. The collection relates to the historical and critical study of his music, as well as being a valuable source of arrangements for performances.

Collection comprises material related to Anglesey's editing of LISTEN UP!: SPOKEN WORD POETRY (1999) and to the performance poetry scene in New York during the 1990s, including correspondence, newspaper clippings, and interview transcripts in various stages of editing.