Diaries and Letters in the Library Stacks: African-Americans

Of the millions of African American women held in bondage over the 250 years that slavery was legal in the U. S., Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) is the only one known to have left papers testifying to her life. This collection includes papers of an African American woman held in slavery.

Personal impressions of conditions and events in the summer of 1964 told in selections from letters home by workers in the Civil Rights movement in that area.

Compiles letters written while the author taught at three Black colleges in the South, challenging discrimination and injustices.

Charlotte Grimke [1837-1914] was a keen observer and meticulous recorder of the events of her day. Her journal chronicles one woman's struggles and accomplishments during this era in U.S. history.

Perhaps the greatest migration in America's history is the movement of African Americans from the southern states to the urban Northeast and Midwest during the first half of the 20th century.

In 1930, Lorenzo Johnstone Greene became a book agent for Carter G. Woodson. Greene, along with four Howard University students, travelled throughout the South and the Southeast selling books published for the study of negro life and history. This diary describes the people and places he visited.

In September 1862, William Benjamin Gould escaped from slavery by rowing to the U.S.S. Cambridge, a Union gunboat patrolling off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. He served in the United States Navy for the remainder of the Civil War and left a diary of his experiences.

The Prewar and Postwar Family Letters of the Johnson-Miller Women of Natchez and New Orleans --
The Diary of Catharine Geraldine Johnson, 1864-1874

By a leader of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s.