"HEREIN lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."

— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Many leaders within the black community, unlike their white contemporaries, have devoted much of their creative lives addressing issues central to the ongoing struggles of their race. The result is a legacy of nonfiction prose and oratory unlike any other.  Black teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other leaders form the mainstay of this corpus. Unlike their white counterparts, black leaders have had to wrestle with the issues of their race alongside the issues of leadership in their chosen professions. They have been forced to defend a position, to justify an action, to correct the perception of an event, to protest an injustice, to celebrate cultural achievement, and to subvert the agenda of a white-dominated society.

Black Thought and Culture provides approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to the present. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art.  The collection begins with the works of Frederick Douglass and is targeted to include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Bunche, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis,Thurgood Marshall, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dysonand many others. When complete, the collection will include the first-ever complete full run of the Black Panther newspaper.

Black Thought and Culture is intended to present a wide range of previously inaccessible material, including letters by athletes such as Jackie Robinson, correspondence by Ida B. Wells, prefatory essays by Amiri Baraka, political leaflets by Huey Newton, and interviews with Paul Robeson. Much of the material is fugitive, and almost twenty percent of the collection has not been published previously.

My Dear Mr. President, I was sitting in the audience of the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying "Oh no! Not again.". . .

                    Extract of letter from Jackie Robinson to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 13, 1958
 

The authors whose writings compose Black Thought and Culture are part of a tradition that has been shaped by events and by the authors themselves. The database illustrates how each writer refers to his or her predecessors and to the seminal events of his or her time. Thanks to Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing, users of the collection can trace the interrelationships among authors, as well as the reactions of various leaders to contemporary events. A Table of Contents of Historical Events facilitates the users’ research.

Black Thought and Culture is a single source for the published works of numerous historically important black leaders. Along with well-known works, the collection features approximately 5,000 pages of unique, fugitive, and never-before-published materials. For example, the collection includes writings by W.E.B. Du Bois from The Amenia Conference, an Historic Negro Gathering and from The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. The database offers unprecedented possibilities for the study of the historical development of black culture and will appeal to students and scholars alike. It will enable teachers to create new courses and to compile reading lists that refer to individual authors, issues, viewpoints, and common critical issues.

Subjects indexed include colonialism, socialism, Marxism, democracy, capitalism, the Labor movement, segregation, poverty, education, religion, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, the New Deal, the World Wars, the Black Liberation movement, the South, the Scottsboro and Herndon trials, black nationalism, miscegenation, the black athlete, civil rights, apartheid, the Black Panther party, the Negritude movement, the NAACP, birth control, the vote, urban ghettoes vs. the rural South, strategies of protest and demonstration, and hundreds more.

The aim of the collection is to provide the non-fiction works of leading African-Americans so that scholars and students can appreciate the development of African American thought from its beginnings to the present.  

• With advice from our editors we have selected some 75 individuals whose works we focus on.  For a select few major authors such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, we plan to include the complete non-fiction works.  Users will find rare materials culled from journals, pamphlets, prefaces and interviews.
• For each thinker we have used standard bibliographies to identify materials.

Associate Professor and Director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Harley teaches courses on Afro-American History, Black Culture, Women's History and Women and Work. She received her Ph.D. in United States History from the Department of History at Howard University and is the recipient of numerous scholarships and fellowships, including the Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Rockefeller Fellowship for Minority Group Scholars, the American Association of University Women, and the Ford Foundation.

Her major recent publication the Timetables of African American History: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in African-American History (Simon & Schuster, 1995) has been adopted as a selection for the History Book Club and the Book-of-the-Month club. She has written articles for the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Negro Education and a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Labor History and contributed essays to numerous publications including Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (New York University Press, 2001), Women and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Class (Sage, 1997), and Nineteenth Century Black Leaders (University of Illinois Press, 1988). She is also editor of Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers University Press, 2002). Currently, she is under contract with W.W. Norton Publishers to publish a book entitled Dignity and Damnation, an historical study of the intersection of gender and women's work in the black community.

Formerly Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at UMCP, Dr. Harley serves as a member of the Maryland Council for the Humanities, consultant to the Office of Equity Assurance and the Office of Staff Development for the Prince George's County School System, and directs the Prince George's County Teachers Institute in Multiculturalism at the University of Maryland. In 1994 she received a presidential award for Outstanding Service to the Schools for her work with the Prince George's County School System. Dr. Harley is currently on leave from UMCP to undertake a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is also currently the co-principal investigator of the Ford Foundation-funded "The Meanings and Representations of Work in the Lives of Women of Color" and the principal investigator and project director of the Ford Foundation planning project "The Center for African-American Women's Labor Studies."

Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975 Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University, where he is now professor of history and director of the King Papers Project. Dr. Carson has also been a visiting professor at American University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University as well as a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Dr. Carson’s writings have appeared in leading historical journals and numerous encyclopedias, as well as in popular periodicals. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, a study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was published in 1981. In Struggle won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. His other publications include Malcolm X: The FBI File (1991). Dr. Carson also served as senior advisor for a fourteen-part, award-winning, public television series on the civil rights movement entitled "Eyes on the Prize" and co-edited the Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (1991). In addition, he served as historical advisor for “Freedom on My Mind,” which was nominated for an Oscar in 1995, as well as for “Chicano!” (1996) and “Blacks and Jews” (1997).

In 1985 Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Under Dr. Carson’s direction, the King Papers Project has produced four volumes of a projected fourteen-volume comprehensive edition of King’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. In addition to these volumes, he has written or co-edited numerous other works based on the papers, including A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998); The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), compiled from the King’s autobiographical writings; and A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001). He also collaborated with Roma Design Group of San Francisco to create the winning proposal in an international competition to design a national memorial in Washington, D. C., for Dr. King.

Dr. Carson has lectured at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad on a wide range of topics including King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and Black-Jewish relations. He has also presented dramatic readings of "Passages of Martin Luther King." Currently he participates in the Organization of American Historians Lectureship Program.

Dr. Russell L. Adams, Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Howard University, has taught a "Comparative Slavery" course for over 20 years. He has been advisor and consultant to several projects on the Middle Passage. He is the author of the popular biographical reference work Great Negroes Past and Present. A popular keynote speaker, Adams has lectured at many universities, including the University of Maryland, Columbia University, Georgetown University, Rutgers University and Harvard University. Adams has published several books and edited collections, and his work has appeared in numerous periodicals. He writes and reviews articles for the Journal of Negro Education. He also served as a primary adviser and contributor to the three-volume Time-Life series African Americans: Voices of Triumph.

Joshua Bloom is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles and Director of the Social Movements Project at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at U.C. Berkeley. He is the author (with Waldo E. Martin, Jr.) of Black Against Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party, New Press forthcoming 2011. He is the editor (with Ruth Milkman and Victor Narro) of Low Wage Worker Organizing and Advocacy: The L.A. Model, Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2010. He has written numerous articles on 20th century Black Liberation Struggle, contemporary labor movements, and social movement theory.

This is the ninth release of Black Thought and Culture. This release of the database includes approximately 1297 sources and 1100 authors. Included here are works by Louis Armstrong, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Benjamin Brawley, Eldridge Cleaver, Stanley Crouch, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nelson George, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Randall Kennedy, Audre Lorde, Joe Louis, Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison, Constance Baker Motley, Elijah Muhammad, Huey Newton, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, Carl Rowan, Bayard Rustin, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, Carl Stokes, Cornel West, Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Malcolm X, Michael Eric Dyson, June Jordan, Manning Marable, Orlando Patterson, Thulani Davis, Ishmael Reed, and more.

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Our thanks to:

Our intention is to have a database without errors.   We appreciate all suggestion for improvements, and those who report factual errors. 

• Ron Welburn notes that in the essay Gil Scott Heron  (S7670-D017) in The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, there is a factual error in the original text: Amiri Baraka misidentifies Mr. Welburn as a poet who accompanied Gil Scott Heron on a trip to Newark in 1970. 

• To report factual errors or to suggest improvements, please email the Editor@AlexanderStreet.com.   Please include the author, the document, and the page number. Please also include your email address, so that we can let you know the status of your correction.

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