An unsurpassed collection of slave literature from 1705 to the late 1880s, includes campaign literature, abolitionist literature, slave narratives, children’s literature, congressional speeches, sermons, letters, organizational proceedings, tracts, and previously published materials from journals and magazines. Authors of note include Wendell Phillips, W.E. B. Dubois, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Jam, and Andrew Johnson.
The HU Clippings file contains 55,000 clippings from nearly 100 Black Newspapers. These clippings provide a unique journalistic record of black, political, economic and cultural life in the early twentieth century, particularly the rural south. The Clippings file was created from 500 scrapbooks spanning from 1880 to the 1920s.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong founded the Southern Workman in 1872. It contains reports from the African American and Native Americans populations, with picture of reservation and plantation life as well as information concerning the life and history of Hampton University, the City of Hampton, and African American life in the South. Additionally, the Southern Workman provided a forum for the discussion of the “race” problem.