National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Poetry, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
This study of black protest poems from the early part of the twentieth century through the late sixties can provide insight into the issues African Americans faced during that time and the ways they responded to them. Works from seven...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Theater, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
A manifesto and scenes from a play illustrating black protest in the theater. LeRoi Jones's short manifesto, "The Revolutionary Theatre," and Douglas Turner Ward's, " Day of Absence" encapsulates the mindset of many black writers and...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Images, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
This article review examples of black protest in art by Claude Clark and Charles White. Links to images and supplemental resources are provided here as well.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Senegambia, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Drawings of West Africans and two accounts of Africans before enslavement, one by an African of Gambia, one by a French traveler to Senegal. They examine how Africans lived in freedom before enslavement.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Sierra Leone, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
An eighteenth-century map, several illustrations by Europeans of Africans from Sierra Leone, and two eighteenth-century narratives depicting Sierra Leone natives through the eyes of two British physicians who describe the peoples they...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community as Place, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
Articles examining the notion of community as place. An essay by James Weldon Johnson and R. Edgar Iles provides different definitions of community by illustrating regional culture.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Gold Coast, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Two documents, separated by 200 years, depicting the lives of enslaved Gold Coast Africans in 1450 and 1657, and three original accounts by Europeans of the cultural practices of Gold Coast Africans.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community on Film, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
Excerpts from a 1941 film that depicts black and white communities in Kannapolis, NC, by H. Lee Waters (1902-1997). This two part film characterizes the differences in economy, community, and values of two separate cultures.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Bight of Biafra, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
An audio clip of a Yoruba drum and two accounts by slaves or their descendants that offer African perspectives on life and culture in the Niger River Delta.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community & Self Help, Making of African American Identity:v. 3
An interview illustrating some of the ways community functioned in the lives of African Americans. It explores how external pressures of racism brought African Americans together to form fraternal organizations and entire towns.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Image of Community, 1939, Making of African American Identity
This resources illustrates how artist Augusta Savage (1892-1962) embodied the virtues of self-help, self-reliance, and close-knit cohesion of the black community in her sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp).
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Kongo, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Eight watercolor drawings and an accompanying narrative from an Italian Catholic missionary about the peoples in the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day Angola).
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Race as Community, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
Articles illustrating how African Americans defined community according to perceptions of race. Links are provided to these works by George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, E. Franklin Frazier.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Capture, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Several narratives of the capture of West Africans, including the famous autobiography of Venture Smith, from the eighteenth century, two accounts of conditions on slave ships, and an audio recording of the memories of the descendants of...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community and the Folk, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
A story that examines African American community in a rural setting. Zora Neale Hurston's (1891-1960) brief tale "Spunk" is provided within this resources and documents the expressions of southern black "folk."
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Enslavement, Making of African American Identity: V. 1, 1500 1865
Twenty-eight primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-that explore plantation life, the qualities and conditions of slavery, work, and resistance to oppression.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community and Memory, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
A story that defines community as a connection between the past and the present. This resource links to Henry Dumas's short story, "Ark of Bones" and reviews its social commentary as it applies to African American community.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: An Enslaved Person's Life, Making of African American Identity
Various photographs of slaves from the pre-Civil War era, an autobiographical narrative of slavery, and three accounts recorded in the 1930s of the lives and conditions of former slaves are included in this large set of information...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Community and Culture, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
An attempt to define community as a shared culture. In this article and review, critic, poet, and playwright Larry Neal (1937-1981) applies the principles of self-determination espoused by Stokely Carmichael and others to the arts and...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Sale, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Two nineteenth century depictions of the emotional brutality of slave auctions-by an enslaved (formerly free) black man and by former slaves-and several recollections of being sold by former slaves recorded during Depression era...
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Plantation, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Numerous photographs of a Virginia plantation (taken in 1960), an autobiographical account of life on a Mississippi plantation from the nineteenth century, and an interview with a former slave about a Louisiana plantation recorded in 1937.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Image of Community, 1968, Making of African American Identity: V.
This article describes the history associated with the sculpture Black Unity, an image of African American community in 1968 by Elizabeth Catlett.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Driver, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Unusual letters from black slave drivers, and in one case, letters in reply from the white slave owner, about crops, labor, and conditions on plantations in the mid-1850s.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Global Community, Making of African American Identity: V. 3
On February 16, 1965, in Rochester, New York, Malcolm X delivered a speech that placed African American in a global black community. Just five days before his assassination, he relates the American civil rights movement to similar...