Black Experience in America, 18th-20th Century, Vol. 1

This is not a history of Black Americans written by others. This is Black Americans writing themselves, across two centuries of struggle, artistry, and survival. The collection gathers fiction, poetry, drama, speeches, and testimony from Project Gutenberg's archives, documents by or about African Americans that have too often been silenced or overlooked. Here are late eighteenth-century letters between Black Baptist preachers debating faith and freedom in the young republic. Here are formerly enslaved people speaking in their own voices in the 1930s, their memories preserved when the living memory of slavery was fading. Here are poets and playwrights, novelists and orators, all insisting on their humanity when the nation denied it. The scope is staggering: from the early republic through the Harlem Renaissance, from the Civil War through Jim Crow. These are not interpretations. They are the raw, unfiltered voices of people who lived the history, and refused to be erased from it.