Special Collections: African American Studies Research Guide (OLD)

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 list of just some of the authors and works held in Special Collections.

Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects
Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Lyrics of a Lowly Life, Poems of Cabin and Field, Lyrics of the Hearthside, Majors and Minors: Poems
W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Violets and Other Tales
Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Sterling Brown’s Southern Roads
Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen
Ishmael Reed’s The Freelance Pallbearers
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)
James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, The Fir Next Time, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone: a Novel.
Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and The Child of Ham
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 
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy: or Shadows Uplifted and Poems
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.
Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.
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.
Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches in the Life of a Free Black
Richard Wright’s Native Son, 12 Million Black Voices: a Folk History of the Negro in the United States, Lawd Today, and Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas
William Still’s The Underground Railroad