Featured Resource
Slavery and Anti-Slavery includes collections on the transatlantic slave trade. It is broken up into four parts.
Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition contains 7,277 books and pamphlets, more than eighty newspaper and periodical titles, and eighteen major manuscript collections, from 1490 to 1896
Part II: The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World continues this ground-breaking series by charting the inception of slavery in Africa and its rise as perpetuated on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, with particular focus on the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.
Part III: The Institution of Slavery is particularly strong in its significant coverage of Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. It examines the institution of slavery through legal documents, plantation records, personal accounts, newspapers, and government documents.
Part IV: Age of Emancipation includes a range of rare documents related to the emancipation of slaves in the United States, as well as Latin America, the Caribbean, and other areas of the world.
New Book
For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s writing over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. In pieces that address the history of abolitionist practice and thought in the United States and globally, the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and stories and lessons of organizing inside and beyond the prison walls, Davis is always curious, always incisive, and always learning.
Blog
James Baldwin
James Baldwin, Master Teacher James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem Hospital (NYC). This year marks the 100th anniversary of his birth. He was a global citizen and first-class public intellectual who used various platforms to reach people in all corners of the world. Baldwin broached questions about race, sexuality, class, and social justice raised by very few writers during and after his time. His prophetic voice lives on through his essays, novels, poetry, and plays. Baldwin continues to be an inspiration for countless people, especially Black and LGBTQ communities. Those who embrace intersectionality can see that concept defined in his works. He was intersectionality before the word was coined. One of his greatest contributions is his impact on writers. For example, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison once said, “I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin’s prose. It liberated me as a writer.” The great Maya Angelou also said, “James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris.” I was first introduced to Baldwin as a teenager in high school in the late ’70s, at a rally for African American judge Bruce Wright at the Zion Baptist Church in Harlem. There had been an effort to have Wright removed from the bench, in part because he dared set bail for Black and low-income people so that they could afford it. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called him “Turn
Special Collections
Black Print offers a snapshot of a robust community of writers thinking actively about Black life and Black art—the beautiful and the sublime, politics and popular culture—primarily through periodicals, pamphlets, and other ephemeral forms. Before social media, before #BlackTwitter, there was nineteenth-century Black print.
Africana Studies & Research Center
Dr. William E. “Bill” Cross. Jr., a member of the Africana Studies & Research Center family passed away on December 5, 2024. Dr. Cross, a native of Evanston, Illinois, taught at Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center from 1973 to 1994. Part of his legacy will be the 16 Africana master’s thesis that he supervised.