"The Library" by Jacob Lawrence from the NMAA

Books and Manuscripts

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg. 1903.

Frazier, Franklin. The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.

Haygood, Atticus G. "The Negro in the South," Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South 19 (1891): 300-315.

Wilmore Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Examination of the Black Experience in Religion. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973.

Woodson, Carter G. The History of the Negro Church. Washington: Associated Publishers, 1921.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House, 1974.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Letter from the Birmingham Jail

King, Martin Luther, Jr. "I Have A Dream"

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Sernett, Milton C. Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787-1865. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1975.

Peterson, Thomas V. Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1978.

Purifoy, Lewis M. "The Southern Methodist Church and the Proslavery Argument." Journal of Southern History 32 (1966): 325-41.

Smith, H. Shelton, In His Image But...": Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 1972.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Washington, Booker, T., Up From Slavery

Archival Materials:

Martin Luther King Papers, Stanford University

Manuscript Resources relating to Afro-American Life in Virginia

"The Emancipation Proclaimation"

The Federal Writers Project (WPA) Oral History Project

These life histories were written by the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936-1940. The Library of Congress collection includes 2,900 documents representing the work of over 300 writers from 24 states. Typically 2,000-15,000 words in length, the documents consist of drafts and revisions, varying in form from narrative to dialogue to report to case history. The histories describe the informant's family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet and miscellaneous observations. Pseudonyms are often substituted for individuals and places named in the narrative texts.