The Schlager Anthology of Black America offers a modern, original sourcebook covering Black history from the 1500s to the present. From the creators and publishers of Milestone Documents in American History, this new three-volume set is built on the principles of inclusivity and accessibility. While presenting the essential primary sources from Black history, from iconic figures such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., this anthology also emphasizes often-marginalized voices, from women to those in the LGBTQ community. In addition, document texts are abridged to remain brief and accessible, even to struggling readers (including ESL students), while activity questions range in difficulty from basic to more advanced. Edited by Dan Royles (To Make the Wounded Whole) and featuring the contributions of numerous scholars, The Schlager Anthology of Black America covers more than 250 milestone sources from African American history.

An Inclusive Approach

The Schlager Anthology of Black America includes all of the classic documents from African American history, while also emphasizing a wide spectrum of voices and perspectives. In Unit 1 (“Many Thousands Gone: Black Experiences in Colonial America"), the set opens with the little-known 1540s narrative of Estevanico el Negro, possibly the first African-born person to set foot in what would later become the continental United States. From there, students and researchers will find slave codes from colonies like Virginia and Louisiana as well as early anti-slavery tracts from John Woolman and slave narratives from Olaudah Equiano and Venture.

As the anthology moves through the American Revolution and Early Republic periods, it covers important pieces from Phillis Wheatley, Prince Hall, and Peter Williams; critical legislation such as the Missouri Compromise; and the intersection of Black slavery and Native American life. The middle units explore the decades before, during, and after the Civil War, as African Americans fought to achieve emancipation and some semblance of civil rights. In the wake of the war's triumph—the eradication of slavery—came “The Betrayal of the Negro" (Unit 7), as Black advances during Reconstruction were wiped out with the advent of Jim Crow laws and Black codes. Critical voices such as Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells are featured in this unit, along with important court cases such as Pace v. Alabama and Plessy v. Ferguson.

As the anthology moves through the twentieth century, it guides students through the important documents and events of each decade, from World War I and race riots in Texas and Oklahoma to the upheaval of the Great Depression and World War II. The flowering of Black cultural life and Black economic struggles during the 1920s and 1930s are seen in sources from Alain Locke and Helene Johnson to Robert Clifton Weaver and Mary McLeod Bethune. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is covered via iconic activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer. The final units cover Black feminism, gender, and sexuality, Black politics in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and the election of Barack Obama, before ending with the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement and platform.

A Focus on Accessibility

The Schlager Anthology of Black America features carefully curated primary sources along with highly targeted activities to help students engage with and analyze primary documents from all periods of African American history, from the 1500s to the present. Document texts are carefully abridged to remain brief and accessible, even to struggling readers (including ESL students), both at the high school as well as early college levels. The commentary that accompanies each document is simple and straightforward. First, a fact box contains the key information about the source: document title, author name, date, document type, and a brief statement of the document's significance. Next, each document includes a concise overview section that places the source in its proper historical context. Following the document text is a list of activity questions that prompt students to think more deeply about the source and its meaning and impact.

Other Features

In addition to the 250 sources and accompanying commentary, The Schlager Anthology of Black America includes unit introductions and Further Readings sections for each of the sixteen units in the set. The set also features a comprehensive subject index and an appendix of document categories.

The Schlager Anthology of Black America represents a modern approach to historical reference. It is an essential resource for students, researchers, and teachers of Black history and is appropriate for high school, academic, and public libraries.

Chapter 1: Many Thousands Gone: Black Experiences in Colonial America

Narratives of Estevanico el Negro in the Southwest (1540s)
Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother (1662)
Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage (1667)
“A Minute against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting” (1688)
Maryland: "An Act Concerning Negro Slaves" (1692)
Virginia's Act Concerning Servants and Slaves XXXIV (1705)
Louisiana’s Code Noir (1724)
James Oglethorpe: “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina” (1739)
John Woolman: "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes" (1754)
Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz: "The Conspiracy of the Negroes against the French," and "Of the Negroes of Louisiana: from The History of Louisiana" (1758)
Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz: "Of the Negroes of Louisiana: from The History of Louisiana" (1758)
Alexander Falconbridge: "An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa" (1788)
"The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African" (1789)
"A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa" (1798)

Chapter 2: In Hope of Liberty: African American Life in the Age of Revolution

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775)
Phillis Wheatley: “His Excellency General Washington” (1775)
Petition of Prince Hall and Other African Americans to the Massachusetts General Court (1777)
Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1780)
"An Account of the Life of Mr. David George," from The Baptist Annual Register (1792)

Chapter 3: Now Comes the Test: Race, Nation, and the Limits of Freedom in the Early Republic"

Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1791)
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (1793)
Richard Allen: “An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice” (1794)
Prince Hall: A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge (1797)
Ohio Black Code (1803)
Letter of Claiborne to Madison (1803)
Peter Williams, Jr.: "Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1808)
Laws of the Creek Nation (1818)
Benjamin Latrobe: "New Orleans and Its People" (1819)
Missouri Compromise (1820)
Laws of the Cherokee Nation (1824-1840)
Zephaniah Kingsley: "A Treatise" (1829)
“Jim Crow” (ca. 1832)
James Creecy: "Language, Dances, Etc. in New Orleans" (1834)
John C. Calhoun: "Slavery a Positive Good” (1837)
Victor Séjour: "The Mulatto (Le Mûlatre)" (1837)
United States v. Amistad (1841)
Salmon P. Chase: "Reclamation of Fugitives from Service" (1847)
Oregon Exclusion Law (1849)
Slavery among the Cherokees and Choctaws (1861)

Chapter 4: There is a River: Abolitionism and Black Protest in Antebellum America

Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm: First Freedom's Journal Editorial (1827)
David Walker: "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World" (1829)
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)
William Lloyd Garrison: First Liberator Editorial (1831)
Lydia Maria Child: "An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans" (1833)
Henry Highland Garnet: "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" (1843)
William Lloyd Garrison: "Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States” (1844)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
Frederick Douglass: First Editorial of the North Star (1847)
William Wells Brown: "Slavery As It Is” (1847)
Frederick Douglass: Letter “To My Old Master” (1848)
Letters to the American Colonization Society (c. 1849)
Sojourner Truth: "Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851)
"Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself" (1851)
Frederick Douglass: "Fourth of July” Speech (1852)
"Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States" (1852)
American Colonization Society: "Things Which Every Emigrant to Liberia Ought to Know" (1852)
Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853)
H. Ford Douglas: "Independence Day" (1860)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Speech for the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1860)
Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Chapter 5: A Divided Nation: The Turbulent Fifties

Compromise of 1850 (1850)
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (1850)
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
John S. Rock: "Whenever the Colored Man is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions” (1858)
William Lloyd Garrison: Speech Relating to the Execution of John Brown (1859)
Wendell Phillips: "The Puritan Principle and John Brown" (1859)
Virginia Slave Code (1860)
Osborne P. Anderson: "A Voice from Harper's Ferry" (1861)

Chapter 6: The Dawn of Freedom: The Civil War and the Reconstruction of a Nation

W.L. Harris: Address to the Georgia General Assembly (1860)
Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
Frederick Douglass: “Men of Color, To Arms!” (1863)
U.S. War Department General Order 143 (1863)
An Ordinance Organizing and Establishing Patrols for the Police of Slaves in the Parish of St. Landry (1863)
Arnold Bertonneau, "Every Man Should Stand Equal Before the Law" (1864)
James H. Payne: Letter about “Sister Penny” (1864)
Thomas Morris Chester: Civil War Dispatches (1864)
John Jones: "The Black Laws of Illinois: and a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed" (1864)
Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865)
Black Code of Mississippi (1865)
William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15 (1865)
Convention of Colored Men: Address to the Loyal Citizens of the United States and to Congress (1865)
Narrative of Wesley Norris (1866)
Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks (1866)
Henry McNeal Turner: Speech on His Expulsion from the Georgia Legislature (1868)
Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868)
Initiation Charge of the Ku Klux Klan (1869)
Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1870)
Richard Harvey Cain: "All That We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights” (1874)

Chapter 7: The Betrayal of the Negro: Black Accommodation and Black Protest in the Era of Jim Crow

The Largest Colored Colony in America! [flyer] (1877)
Frederick Douglass: "Our National Capital” Lecture (1877)
"Report of the minority, in report and testimony of the select committee to Investigate the causes of the removal of the Negroes from the southern states to the northern states" (1880)
Pace v. Alabama (1883)
Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1883 (1883)
Anna Julia Cooper: "Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” (1886)
Lucy Parsons: "The Negro: Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayers to the Preacher" (1886)
George Washington Williams: Open Letter to King Leopold on the Congo (1890)
John L. Moore: "In the Lion’s Mouth” (1891)
Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address (1895)
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: "Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women” (1895)
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
W.E.B. Du Bois: "Strivings of the Negro People” (1897)
Mary Church Terrell: "The Progress of Colored Women" (1898)
Black soldiers' letters from the Philippines (1898-1901)
James W. Poe: "The Slaughter in the Philippines and Its Relation to Massacres of Our People in the South" (1899)
H.T. Johnson: "The Black Man's Burden" (1899)
James Weldon Johnson: "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1900)
George White: Farewell Address to Congress (1901)
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Ida B. Wells: "Booker T. Washington and His Critics" (1904)
W.E.B. Du Bois: "The Parting of the Ways” (1904)
Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles (1905)
Kelly Miller: "The Economic Handicap of the Negro in the North" (1906)
Booker T. Washington: Letter to William Howard Taft (1908)
Ida B. Wells: "Lynching: Our National Crime" (1909)
Arthur A. Schomburg, "Racial Integrity: a plea for the establishment of a chair of Negro history in our schools and colleges, etc." (1913)
Monroe Trotter: Protest to Woodrow Wilson (1914)
W.E.B. Du Bois: "The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant” (1914)
"A Memorial to the Atlanta, Georgia, Board of Education" (1917)

Chapter 8: If We Must Die: World War I and the New Negro Renaissance

W.E.B. Du Bois: “The Migration of Negroes” (1917)
Robert R. Moton: "The American Negro and the World War" (1918)
W.E.B. Du Bois: "Returning Soldiers” (1919)
Claude McKay: “If We Must Die” (1919)
How to Stop Lynching (1919)
The Negro and the Labor Union: An NAACP Report (1919)
The Colored Americans in France (1919)
Africa and the World Democracy (1919)
"The Riot at Longview, Texas" (1919)
William Pickens: "The Woman Voter Hits the Color Line" (1920)
Walter F. White: "Election Day in Florida" (1920)
Cyril Briggs: Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood (1920)
Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa” (1921)
William Pickens: "Lynching and Debt-Slavery" (1921)
Buck Colbert Franklin: "The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims" (1921)
"To the World" (manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress) (1921)
Jessie Fauset: "Some Notes on Color" (1922)
Marcus Garvey: “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association” (1922)
Claude McKay: “Soviet Russia and the Negro” (1923)
Horace Mann Bond: "Intelligence Tests and Propaganda" (1924)
Eric D. Walrond: "Imperator Africanus—Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?" (1925)
Alain Locke: "Enter the New Negro” (1925)
James Weldon Johnson: "Harlem: The Culture Capital” (1925)
Marita O. Bonner: "On Being Young—A Woman—And Colored" (1925)
Langston Hughes: "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926)
Helene Johnson: "Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem" (1927)
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot” (1927)
Zora Neale Hurston: "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928)
James Weldon Johnson: "Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist" (1928)
Manhattan Medical Society: "Equal Opportunity: No More, No Less!" (1931)
Carter G. Woodson: "The Miseducation of the Negro" (1931)
Sterling Brown: "Ma Rainey" (1932)

Chapter 9: Making a New Deal: African Americans, Organized Labor, and Shifting Political Alliances"

Elmer A. Carter: "Communism and the Negro Tenant Farmer" (1931)
Appeal of the Scottsboro Mothers (1932)
William Patterson: "Manifesto to the Negro People" (1932)
Cyril Briggs: "War in the East" (1932)
W.E.B. Du Bois: "Marxism and the Negro Problem” (1933)
Letter from Ben Davis to Samuel Liebowitz (1934)
African Americans' letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt (1935)
Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts” (1935)
Walter F. White: "U.S. Department of (White) Justice” (1935)
Richard Wright: "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937)
John Henry: "Landlord What in the Heaven is the Matter with You?" (1937)
Mary McLeod Bethune: "What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?” (1939)
Alan Lomax: "Afro-American Spiriuals, Work Songs, and Ballads" (1942)

Chapter 10: Double V: African Americans, World War II, and the Cold War"

A. Philip Randolph: "Call to Negro America to March on Washington” (1941)
Bayard Rustin: "The Negro and Nonviolence" (1942)
War Labor Board: Equal Pay for Black Workers (1943)
To Secure These Rights (1947)
W.E.B. Du Bois: “An Appeal to the World” (1947)
Charles Hamilton Houston: brief in Hurd v Hodge (1948)
Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted” (1949)
Richard Wright: "The White Problem in the United States" (1949)
Civil Rights Congress: "We Charge Genocide" (1951)
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Paul Robeson: "Ho Chi Minh is Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China" (1954)
Adam Clayton Powell: Speech on Civil Rights (1955)
James May and William Gordon: "What I Tell My Child about Color" (1955)
Paul Robeson: Testimony Before HUAC" (1956)
George McMillan: "The Ordeal of Bobby Cain" (1956)
Southern Manifesto (1956)
Bayard Rustin: Montgomery Diary (1956)
Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back” (1957)
Charles Diggs: "U.S. Policy on Africa" (1959)

Chapter 11: From Montgomery to Selma: The Modern Civil Rights Movement

Negroes' Most Urgent Needs (1957)
Ella Baker: "Bigger than a Hamburger” (1960)
George E. McMillan: "Mr. Local Custom Must Die" (1960)
Jesús Colón: "Greetings from Washington" (from A Puerto Rican in New York) (1961)
Malcolm X: "Message to the Grass Roots" (1963)
Martin Luther King Jr.: "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I Have a Dream" Speech (1963)
March on Washington Organizing Manual No. 2 (1963)
Fannie Lou Hamer: Testimony at the Democratic National Convention (1964)
Malcolm X: "The Ballot or the Bullet" Speech (1964)
Moynihan Report (1965)
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
Adam Clayton Powell: "Black Power: A Form of Godly Power" (1967)
Martin Luther King Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (1967)
Kerner Commission Report Summary (1968)
Ella Baker: "The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle” (1969)
Ella Baker: "Developing Community Leadership" (1970)
Interview with Gussie Nesbitt (1979)
Jo Ann Robinson: "The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It" (1987)

Chapter 12: Say It Loud: Black Power and the Search for a New Radical Paradigm

Carlos Cooks: "Hair Conking; Buy Black" (1955)
Stokely Carmichael: "Black Power” (1966)
Black Panther Party: “What We Want, What We Believe” (1966)
Nguzo Saba (1966)
Piri Thomas: "Brothers Under the Skin" (from Down These Mean Streets) (1967)
Hoyt Fuller: "Towards a Black Aesthetic" (1968)
Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism (1968)
Eldridge Cleaver: "Education and Revolution" (1969)
Mboya's Rebuttal (Ebony Magazine) (1969)
Jesse Owens: Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man (1970)
Angela Davis: "Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation" (1971)
Adam Clayton Powell: "Black Power and the Future of Black America" (1971)
Statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (1971)
Ishmael Reed: "Neo HooDoo Manifesto" (1972)
FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad (1973)

Chapter 13: From the Bullet to the Ballot: Black Politics in the Post–Civil Rights Decade

National Black Political Convention Gary Declaration (1972)
Time: "Cities: New Men for Detroit and Atlanta" (1974)
Shirley Chisholm: “The Black Woman in Contemporary America” (1974)
Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel (1974)
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978)
Thurgood Marshall: Equality Speech (1978)
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: "Affirmative Action in the 1980s" (1981)

Chapter 14: "I Rise": Black Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality

Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)
Audre Lorde: "Poetry is Not a Luxury" (1977)
Mel Boozer: Democratic National Convention Speech (1980)
Cheryl Clarke: "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community" (1983)
Clarence Pendleton: "Comparable Worth is Not Pay Equity" (1985)
Joseph Beam: "Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart" (1986)
June Jordan: "A New Politics of Sexuality" (1991)

Chapter 15: A Different World: African American Life and Politics at the End of the Millennium

Jesse Jackson: Democratic National Convention Keynote Address (1984)
Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission Report (1986)
Jesse Jackson: "The Struggle Continues" (1988)
John Conyers: H.R.3745—Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act (1989)
Anita Hill: Opening Statement at the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Clarence Thomas (1991)
A. Leon Higginbotham: "An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague" (1991)
African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (1991)
Barbara Jordan: "Change: From What to What?" (1992)
The African American Clergy: Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS (1994)
Colin Powell: Commencement Address at Howard University (1994)
Louis Farrakhan: Million Man March Pledge (1995)
Cornel West: "The Black Church Beyond Homophobia" (1995)
One America in the 21st Century (1998)
Clarence Thomas: Concurrence/Dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)
Jesse Jackson: "The Fight for Civil Rights Continues" (2005)

Chapter 16: From Katrina to Obama and Beyond

Adolph L. Reed Jr.: “When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina” (2006)
Congressional Report on Response to Hurricane Katrina (2006)
Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union” Speech (2008)
U.S. Senate Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African Americans (2009)
Barack Obama: Address to the NAACP Centennial Convention (2009)
Barack Obama: First Inaugural Address (2009)
Jesse Washington: "Trayvon Martin and the Black Male Code" (2012)
Tamara Winfrey Harris: "All Hail the Queen?" (2013)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Dissent in Shelby County v. Holder (2013)
Alicia Garza: "A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement" (2014)
Movement for Black Lives Platform (2016)
Barack Obama: Farewell Address (2017)

The Schlager Anthology of Black America collects more than 250 essential documents that together paint a complex, layered, and inclusive portrait of African American history. This collection includes well-worn classics of Black literature and oratory, such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. To these, the Schlager Anthology adds diverse and dissenting voices that represent the cutting edge of research in African American history and confound any single, overarching narrative of Black life in the United States. Instead, this collection conveys the diversity of thought, expression, and action by people of African descent within the present-day boundaries of the United States, through a wide range of speeches, letters, manifestos, poems, plays, spirituals, and union songs.

Beginning in the period of European colonization, The Schlager Anthology of Black America goes beyond English colonies to include the presence and treatment of Africans and their descendants in New Spain and New France as well. Here readers will find Spanish accounts of Estevanico el Negro, possibly the first African-born person to set foot in what would later become the United States, whose story also pushes the beginning of African American history back to the 1540s, when he entered Spanish territory that is now part of New Mexico. Readers will also find numerous documents for the history of the Louisiana colony, including an account of a thwarted 1730 uprising by enslaved Africans, observations of Black expressive culture in New Orleans, and a handwringing 1803 letter from William C. C. Claiborne, governor of the newly acquired Territory of Orleans, to James Madison, in which he mulled the question of whether to recommission a local free Black militia.

If Claiborne’s letter speaks to the shifting legal and social regimes to which people of African descent found themselves subjected, then so too do the legal codes of the Creek and Cherokee nations, which—among other things—prohibited interracial marriage and provided for the organization of slave patrols. These sources also pick up another key theme of this collection: the interaction between African Americans and other non-white groups. For example, readers will note the variety of ways that Black soldiers in the Spanish-American War did (or did not) connect their experiences with racism at home to the war abroad.

Many of the documents in The Schlager Anthology of Black America likewise speak to the history of Black internationalism, from the colonization schemes of the 19th century to the Pan-African movement of the early 20th century to the ways that African Americans engaged with and responded to the national liberation movements in Africa and Asia that followed World War II. Closely related to and overlapping these sources are those that document the history of the Black left, including the role of Communist Party members in organizing Black workers and defending the Scottsboro Boys, as well as the interest of Black leftists in the Soviet Union and China. Here readers will find well-known sources such as King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech alongside newly digitized works, such as a statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement on their employer’s ties to the white nationalist government of South Africa.

The Schlager Anthology of Black America also includes a number of sources that highlight the intersection of Blackness with other identities. For example, excerpted works from Jesús Colón, Piri Thomas, and Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman also offer insight into Afro-Latinx experiences in the United States, and tie this collection to histories of Afro-Caribbean migration. Similarly, numerous documents in this collection speak to Black women’s history and Black queer history. These include Mel Boozer’s speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, calling on the party to support lesbian and gay rights; a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves,” in which 1,600 Black women signed on to a public statement protesting the racist and sexist treatment of Anita Hill during confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas; Essex Hemphill’s wrenching 1986 poem “For My Own Protection”; and Tamara Winfrey Harris’s writing for Bitch Media on Beyoncé’s feminist politics.

Sources in The Schlager Anthology of Black America also trace the history of anti-Black violence in the United States, including murderous white southern “Redeemer” governments at the end of the 19th century; the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by a heavily armed white mob; and the violence of state neglect that played out in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Together, these documents make clear the terrible double bind of the Black freedom struggle: African Americans risked life and limb to make life better for themselves and for future generations, but in doing so faced violent recrimination at every turn. Some of these documents also speak to one another across time and space. For example, readers may note the similarities between William Gordon’s 1955 account of trying to teach his son about Jim Crow without leading him to become “embittered” and Jesse Washington’s reflection on teaching the “Black male code” to his pre-teen son in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder.

With The Schlager Anthology of Black America, we offer to readers a cross-section of Black life in the United States, from the centuries before its founding all the way up to the present day. In doing so, we aim to capture the broad sweep of African American history in all of its breadth and depth, its triumph and tragedy, its complexity, and its clarion calls to create a more perfect union. At the same time, no single collection could hope to encompass African American history in all of its vastness. We therefore hope that The Schlager Anthology of Black America will be the starting point for countless future hours of further reading, reflection, and research.

—Dan Royles, April 2021

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The Schlager Anthology of Black America

A Student's Guide to Essential Primary Sources