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Special Collections: African American Studies Research Guide (OLD)

African American Print Resources

African American Literature

Special Collections holdings include works by African American literary authors from the colonial period to contemporary times, with a concentration on the period of the Harlem Renaissance. Special Collections holds substantial works by authors Amiri Baraka, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Clarence Majors, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Ishmael Reed. Among the print sources are numerous folios including a collection of poetry broadsides published by Broadside Press, which was founded by Dudley Randall in Detroit in the 1960s. The broadsides feature the works of renowned poets Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, and Dudley Randall. The list below provides a sampling of some of the African American literary works held in Special Collections. It is not a complete list:

Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects
Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Violets and Other Tales (1895).
Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues
Sterling Brown’s Southern Roads
Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Passing
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
Countee Cullen’s The Ballad of the Brown Girl: an Old Ballad Retold, Copper Son, The Black Christ and Other Poems
Claude McKay's  Banjo: a Story Without a Plot, A Long Way Home, Harlem Glory: a Fragment of Aframerican Life
Jean Toomer's Cane
Arna Bontemps’s 100 Years of Negro Freedom, They Seek a City, (Dodd Mead and Company Archive has his contract)
Sterling A. Brown’s Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs, Georgia Sketches, Three Poems, Southern Road: Poems
William Wells Brown’s The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, The American Fugitive in Europe. Sketches of Places and People Abroad, The Anti-Slavery-Harp: a Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings
Josephine Brown (William Wells Brown’s daughter) Biography of an American Bondman
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage My Freedom, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Kossuth. Peterboro, May 25, 1852 letter to Frederick Douglass. 
Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and I Saw a Slave Ship
Jessie Redmon Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree: a Novel of American Life
Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho 
James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, Negro Americans, What Now, The Race Problem and Peace and Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day.
Alain Locke’s Negro Art: Past and Present, Plays of Negro Life: A Source-book of Native American Drama, The New Negro: an Interpretation and Four Negro Poets
Richard Bruce Nugent’s Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still
Nancy Prince’s A Narrative of the life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince.
Wallace Thurman’s The Interne, Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Young Negro Artists, Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: a Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section
Sojourner Truth’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the Law of New York, 1828
Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death and Black and Unknown Bards: a Collection of Negro Poetry
Booker T. Washington’s Black-belt Diamonds: Gems from the Speeches, Addresses, and talks to Students of Booker T. Washington, My Larger Education: Being Chapters from my Experience, Frederick Douglass, The Negro in Business, and other works.
William Still’s The Underground Railroad
Octavia E. Butler: Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995).
Walter Dean Myers: Harlem: a Poem (1997).
Martin Luther King, Jr.:  Stride Toward Freedom : The Montgomery Story (1958).
Ernest J. Gaines: A Lesson Before Dying (1993).
Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings (1969); And Still I Rise (1978); On the Pulse of Morning (1993).
James McBride: The Color of Water : a Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man (1952); Juneteenth: a Novel (1999).
Claude Brown: The Child of Ham (1976); Man Child in the Promised Land (1965).
Nikki Giovanni: Black Feeling, Black Talk (1971); My House: Poems (1972); The 100 Best African American Poems : (*but I cheated) (2010).
James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son (1955); The Fire Next Time (1963).
Amira Baraka: Dutchman, and The Slave : Two Plays (1964); Blues People; Negro Music in White America (1963).
Zora Neal Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1938); Mules and Men (1935).
Gwendolyn Brooks: A Street in Bronzeville (1945).
Alice Walker: The Color Purple: a Novel (1982)
Ntozake Shange: Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo : a Novel (1982).
Walter Mosely: Devil in a Blue Dress (1990).
Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo (1989); Flight to Canada (1976).
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk : Essays and Sketches (1961).
Anna Deavere Smith: Fires in the Mirror : Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities (1993).
Cupcake Brown: A Piece of Cake : a Memoir (2006).
Richard Wright: Native Son (1940); Bright and Morning Star (1938).
June Jordon: Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002).
Toni Cade Bambara: Gorilla, My Love (1972); Raymond's Run (1990).
Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996).
Marilyn Nelson: Magnificat (1994); The Homeplace : Poems (1990).
August Wilson: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom : a Play in Two Acts (1985).
Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun (1959).
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Iola Leroy ; or, Shadows Uplifted (1893).
Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Give Us Each Day : the Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1984).
Paul Dunbar: Li'l' Gal (1904); Joggin' erlong (1906); Lyrics of a Lowly Life, Poems of Cabin and Field, Lyrics of the Hearthside, Majors and Minors: Poems
Ed Bullins: New Plays From the Black Theatre : an Anthology (1969); Five plays: Goin' a Buffalo; In the Wine Time; A Son, Come Home; The Electronic Nigger; Clara's Ole Man (1969).
Harriet E. Wilson: Our Nig; or, Sketches in the Life a Free Black: in a two-story House, North, Showing that Slavery's Shadow Falls Even There (1859).

Slave Narratives:

Frederick Douglass:  My Bondage My Freedom; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape From Bondage, and His Complete History.
Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and I Saw a Slave Ship
Elizabeth Keckley: Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.
Nancy Prince:  A Narrative of the life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince.
Sojourner Truth:  Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the Law of New York, 1828
Solomon Northup: Twelve years a slave : narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River, in Louisiana.
Solomon Bayley:  A narrative of some remarkable incidents in the life of Solomon Bayley : formerly a slave in the state of Delaware, North America
Aunt Sally: or, the Cross the way of Freedom: a Narrative of the Slave-Life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams of Detroit.
Charles Ball:  Slavery in the United States; a Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived 40 years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave.
James
Williams:  Narrative of James Williams : an American slave, who was for several years a driver on a cotton plantation in Alabama.
Phillis Wheately: Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley: a Native African and a Slave.

Newspapers/Periodicals: 

African American newspapers and periodicals include the The Delaware Valley Star, The Delaware Star, National Anti-Slavery Standard, The People's Pulse, The Delaware Spectator,  and The Delaware Defender.  These sources are housed in the Delaware Collection, with additional contemporary reports and studies relating to issues such as African American education, housing, healthcare, and military service. Some newspapers and periodicals are available through the America's Historical Newspapers' database. Click on the link below.