National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Race as Community, Making of African American Identity: V. 3

Letters by African Americans seeking help to leave the South. They explore issues including identity, family, community, and the struggles induced by the need to migrate north.

This resource describes popular anthem that expresses the early hopes of the civil rights movement by Curtis Mayfield. It explores the obstacles the civil rights movement had to overcome and the movement's affect on the lives of African...

Memoirs and a painting illustrating African American life under segregation. These resources help describe what it was like for an African American man or woman to enter the white world.

An essay that examines the relationship between racial separation and power. In this essay Stokely Carmichael advocates for the coalescence of political and economic power within the black community in a way that liberates and insulates...

A short story that explores the influence of the Southern plantation past on African American efforts to create new urban identities and the predicaments of post-emancipation life.

A poem, an address, and a blues song that express black life in the first fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The texts examine whether the true meaning of the proclamation carried forward to the lives African Americans.

Two poems that explore the struggles of African Americans in the early-twentieth century. Links to both poems by Fenton Johnson are provided, and illustrate the struggles experienced as black man in white America in the 1910s

An audio clip of a Yoruba drum and two accounts by slaves or their descendants that offer African perspectives on life and culture in the Niger River Delta.

Interviews with and narratives from former slaves who became free and letters from former slaves reflecting on their freedom.

A summary and questions related to an autobiography in which Booker T. Washington describes his early experience of freedom. A link to this full text is provided here as well.