A rare broadside printed for distribution at the 4th of July gathering of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Abington, Massachusetts in 1848, an event attended by some 3000 to 5000 (according to The Liberator) and featuring a number of prominent abolitionists, including William Wells Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. This.....
An apparently unrecorded Reconstruction-era campaign broadside urging New Jersey voters to cast their ballots against African American suffrage. Warning that “Every vote for the Republican Ticket is a vote in favor of Negro Suffrage,” that is, “of Congress compelling us to let the Negro Vote,” this broadside announces that “Every.....
A broadsheet issued by the California campaign office of Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy shortly before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., featuring endorsements by some twenty prominent Black Californians. At the top of this campaign handbill is a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at the March.....
An apparently unrecorded broadside printing of a fearmongering letter written from the storied Nitta Yuma plantation just a few months before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, defending slavery, the Southern spirit, and all Southern states from hostile takeover by a “black avalanche.” Citing economic and population statistics—both Black and.....
An original memorial fan, apparently manufactured soon after Martin Luther King’s assassination and advertising an African American-owned mortuary in San Diego. A photographic image of Dr. King appears on one side of the fan, below which he is described as “Minister - Civil Rights Leader - Nobel Prize Winner.” The.....
An apparently unrecorded illustrated broadside advertising a performance of the globe-trotting Knoxville College Quartet early in the blockbusting “race record” era. The historically-Black Knoxville College was founded a decade after the Civil War by the United Presbyterian Church “to provide the most thorough literary, classical and scientific training, together with.....
An apparently unrecorded broadsheet picturing and describing the 1971 Anti-STRESS rally in Detroit and promoting membership in the Black Workers Congress. The rally took place on September 23rd, 1971: “THOUSANDS of Black workers, students, housewives turned out…to protest the outrageous slaughter of Black people occurring in plants, prisons, and our.....
A scarce poster, signed by Ericka Huggins, calling for “a massive demonstration” in New Haven to support six female Black Panthers being held at the Connecticut women’s prison in Niantic. The protest was scheduled for November 22nd and would consist of “A march…from Beaver Pond Park, eight blocks to the.....
A rare example of the sign carried by striking sanitation workers in Memphis following the assassination there of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4th, 1968, from the collection of civil rights activist Samuel Walker. The Memphis sanitation workers’ strike began on February 12th, 1968, after years of low wages.....
An unrecorded broadside advertising land for sale specifically to African American residents on Smith Street in the city of Mullins, South Carolina in the early-twentieth century. The broadside was printed at a time of seismic industrial changes in the American South. At the turn of the century even the rural.....
A “Negro uplift” broadside advertising near-life size portraits of six important figures in African American history—Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Lincoln, Phillis Wheatley, and Toussaint Louverture. The first three reproduce photographic portraits, while the latter three are reproductions of paintings or engravings. These “Large pictures” are.....
An unrecorded broadside printed by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company (MKT), containing the text of the state of Texas’ 1907 separate cars law, mandating “separate but equal” train cars for Black passengers. Despite an anti-segregation statute passed during Radical Reconstruction in 1871, Jim Crow laws were quickly reintroduced to Texas in.....
An exceedingly rare Blind Tom biographical sketch, published in connection with his appearance in Philadelphia to give a series of concerts over the course of three weeks in September and early October of 1865. Newspaper notices appearing in The Philadelphia Inquirer trace his performances there. On September 4, the paper.....
A scarce playbill for a New York Uncle Tom’s Cabin company promoting a performance of the play itself, interspersed with several variety show acts. An early, transitional form of the “Tom Show,” the performance of “this immortal drama” advertised here “introduc[es] Specialties between each act by recognized artists.” Relatively little.....
A very scarce calendar with illustrations after photographs showing Howard University students reenacting the annunciation, immaculate conception, and nativity scenes as depicted in Italian Renaissance paintings. The recreations are after works by Correggio, Bellini, Raphael Santi, Murillo, Fra Angelico, and Andrea del Sarto, among others, and were staged as part.....
![Item #10152 Katherine Dunham [cover title]. Nelson L. Gross in association with Dan Melnick...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/10152_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1784728143)
A scarce and wonderfully illustrated souvenir program for Katherine Dunham’s Bal Nègre, providing an overview of Dunham’s stunning and innovative career, her oeuvre, and her dance school. This program was published for Dunham’s production Bal Nègre, which opened at New York’s Belasco Theater in 1946 and played at the Geary.....
An unrecorded anti-slavery broadside responding to a local newspaper’s fearmongering by eloquently explaining the real “object and motives of the Anti-Slavery Society.” Abolitionism, as this broadside explains, is motivated by “humanity and justice,” and the aims of the Anti-Slavery Society are not, as the Rochester Gazette article evidently suggested, “to.....
An exceptionally rare broadside advertising the exhibition in Bridgeport, Connecticut of Joice Heth, an enslaved elderly Black woman presented to the public by P. T. Barnum as once the nursemaid to the infant George Washington, featuring a wood engraving depicting her with unusually long hands and fingernails, effectively echoing the.....
![Item #9056 free the DETROIT 15 [recto title]. Who Are the Black Panthers? [verso title]. Black...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/9056_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1723572231)
A scarce broadsheet raising awareness of the plight of the “Detroit 15” and soliciting money for their legal fund. Featuring an image of Huey Newton standing with a shotgun, the recto of this broadsheet announces that the “Detroit 15” are members of the Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party.....
A scathing Black Panther Party condemnation of the police, equating officers with “pigs” and offering Huey Newton’s view on the importance of arming Black Americans. Featuring an illustration of a pig in police attire, this incendiary broadside defines the “People’s No. 1 Enemy”—the police, or “pigs”—asA low natured beast, that.....
The strikingly illustrated first issue of “the official voice” of a Detroit coalition of “Black workers, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, native Americans, and Asians.” This inaugural issue of Siege was published shortly after the first meeting of the Black Workers Congress, held in Gary, Indiana on Labor Day weekend of 1971.....
A rare, jam-packed minstrel show playbill with blackface performances by Buckleys Serenaders in their Boston theater, brimming with ‘comic’ descriptions of three acts plus general information. Part I of this program includes melodies such as Darky Felicity and Farm Yard; Part II features variety acts such as the song and.....
A rare broadside offering a reward for a partially-blind, mixed-race horse thief who escaped his initial arrest in Anderson, South Carolina three years after the Civil War. Issued by prominent Anderson, South Carolina horse-thief-catcher and future politician John R. Cochran, this broadside reads in full:I will pay the above reward.....
A “negro uplift” recruiting poster appealing to the Black community and countering the racist trope of African Americans being lazy. This poster features an African American serviceman tenderly saying good-bye to his wife or girlfriend. The couple stands in a walkway in front of a residence while in the background.....
A remarkable newspaper address—one of Paul Cuffee’s few published writings—printed in the wake of his unsuccessful Congressional petition to trade with Sierra Leone during the War of 1812 and expressing his gratitude to the international network of allies with whom he worked to abolish the slave trade. Cuffee expresses his.....