John Rolfe's Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys (1619)
Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to Conditions of the Mother (Virginia) (1662)
Baptism of Slaves Does Not Exempt from Bondage (Virginia) (1667)
Resolutions of the Germantown Mennonites Against Slavery; February 18, 1688 (1688)
John Woolman, "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes" (1754)
Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775)
Petition of Prince Hall and Others for Freedom (1777)
Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1780)
Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia (sections on Slavery and Race)" (1784)
U.S. Constitution clauses about slavery (1787)
Benjamin Banneker Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1791)
Fugitive Slave Act (1793)
Prince Hall, "Thus Doth Ethiopia Stretch Out Her Hand from Slavery to Freedom and Equality" (1797)
Ohio Black Code (1804)
Peter Williams, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade" (1808)
Richard Allen, “The Founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church" (1816)
Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, first editorial of Freedom’s Journal (1827)
David Walker, "David Walker’s Appeal To The Coloured Citizens of the World" (1829)
Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin’s opinion in State v. Mann (1829)
William Lloyd Garrison’s First Liberator Editorial (1831)
Nat Turner, “The Confession of Nat Turner” (excerpt) (1831)
U.S. Appellants v. the Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad (1841)
Solomon Northrup, "Description of a Slave Auction" (1841)
Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)
Henry Highland Garnet, "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" (1843)
First editorial of the North Star (1847)
William Wells Brown, “Slavery As It Is" (1847)
Roberts v. City of Boston (1849)
Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I A Woman?" (1851)
Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852)
Martin R. Delany, "A Black Nationalist Manifesto" (1852)
Henry Brown, "Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown" (1854)
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
John S. Rock, “Whenever the Black Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions" (1858)
Virginia Slave Code (1860)
Osborne P. Anderson, excerpt from A Voice from Harper’s Ferry (1861)
Harriet Jacobs, Excerpt from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
War Department General Order 143 (creation of U.S. Colored Troops) (1863)
Frederick Douglass, “Men of Color to Arms!” March 21, 1863 (1863)
Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
Mississippi Black Code (1865)
General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 (1865)
Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
Testimony for the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on atrocities in South against blacks (1866)
Henry McNeal Turner—Speech on the occasion of his expulsion from the Georgia legislature (1868)
Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
Ku Klux Klan Acts (1871)
U.S. v. Cruickshank (1873)
Richard Harvey Cain, “All We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation and Equal Rights” speech (1874)
Civil Rights Cases (1883)
T. Thomas Fortune, “The Present Relations of Labor and Capitol” (1886)
John E. Bruce, “Organized Resistance Is Our Best Remedy” (1889)
Anna Julia Cooper, any of her writings on the colored woman from A Voice from the South, Part 1 (1890s)
Letter by Rev. J. L. Moore of the Colored Farmers Alliance published in the National Economist on March 7, 1891 (1891)
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women” (1895)
Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895)
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett. “Lynch Law in America” (1900)
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, excerpt (1900)
George White’s farewell address to Congress (1901)
W. E. B. Du Bois, from Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Brownsville riot: Summary Discharge or Mustering Out of Regiments or Companies. Message from the President of the United States (1905)
Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles (1905)
Mary Church Terrell, “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States” (1906)
New York Act Creating a Colored Infantry Regiment in New York City (1913)
Monroe Trotter Confronts Woodrow Wilson on Segregation (1914)
Guinn vs. United States (1915)
Thirty Years of Lynching. NAACP Pamphlet (1919)
William Pickens, “The Kind of Democracy the Negro Expects” (1919)
Cyril Briggs, Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood (1920)
Walter White, "The Eruption of Tulsa" (1921)
Marcus Garvey, "The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association" (1922-1923)
James Weldon Johnson—“Harlem the Cultural Capital” (1925)
Alain Locke, “The New Negro” (1925)
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, “The Negro Woman and the Ballot” (1927)
Scottsboro trial: Haywood Patterson, Scottsboro Boy (1930s)
John P. Davis. "A Black Inventory of the New Deal" (1935)
Robert C. Weaver, "The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at Facts" (1935)
Walter White, "U.S. Department of (White) Justice" (1935)
Charles Hamilton Houston, “Educational Inequalities Must Go!” (1935)
Mary McLeod Bethune, “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?” (1939)
A. Philip Randolph speech about March on Washington (1941)
To Secure these Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (1947)
Executive Order 9981 (1948)
Ralph J. Bunche, “The Barriers of Race Can be Surmounted” (1949)
Sweatt v. Painter (Texas) (1950)
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Roy Wilkins, “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back” (1957)
John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights Address (delivered 11 June) (1963)
George Wallace Inaugural Address as Governor (1963)
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)
Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream” Speech (1963)
Civil Rights Act (1964)
Testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer to the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention (1964)
Malcolm X Speech “After the Bombing”—Speech at Ford Auditorium (1965)
The Moynihan Report (1965)
Bond v. Floyd (1966)
Stokely Carmichael, Speech on Black Power at Berkeley (1966)
South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966)
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence" (1967)
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
Kerner Commission Report (1968)
Eldridge Cleaver, “Education and Revolution” (1969)
Jesse Owens—Excerpt from Blackthink (1970)
Clay aka. Ali v. U.S. (1971)
Angela Davis's "Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation" (1971)
Jackie Robinson, excerpt from I Never Had It Made (1972)
FBI investigative report on Elijah Muhammad (1973)
Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1974)
Shirley Chisholm, “The Black Woman in Contemporary America” (1974)
Thurgood Marshall, "Equality Speech" (1978)
Jesse Jackson, 1984 Democratic National Convention Address (1984)
Anita Hill, opening statement at the sexual harassment hearing of Clarence Thomas (1991)
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. "An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague" (1992)
Colin Powell, “General Colin Powell Urges African American Students to Reject Racial Hatred” (1994)
Louis Farrakhan, Million Man March Pledge (1995)
“Executive Summary” to One America in the Twenty-First Century: The Report of President Clinton’s Commission on Race (1999)
Clarence Thomas, separate opinion dissent in part in Gruter v. Bollinger (2003)
Barack Obama, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union,” Speech in Philadelphia (2008)
Barack Obama, Inaugural Address (2009)
Barack Obama Speech to NAACP (2009)
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