A revealing gathering of receipts, payroll sheets, vouchers, and other documents spanning four years of operation at Fort St. Philip—a location of immense strategic importance to New Orleans—and including a large payroll sheet listing the names, terms of service, and compensation for over thirty enslaved laborers, as well as the.....
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.....
![Item #9778 [Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts Douglass.] Sulfur Bitters, the Great Blood Purifier](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/9778_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1755626638)
One of the more notorious images in the iconography of Frederick Douglass, being a racist satire used for advertising purposes on the rear wrapper of a booklet issued by a manufacturer of “sulfur bitters.” Douglass and his white wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, are shown just outside a pharmacy where a......
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.....
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 ultimately fruitless petition, signed by the townspeople of Lenox, Massachusetts, entreating the United States Senate not to accept Florida into the Union as a slave state. Florida Territory already operated on a largely plantation-based economy, and abolitionists were rightly worried when it began seeking statehood in the late 1830s.....
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.....
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.....
![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.....
Three general orders issued by officers of the Department of Virginia, Army of the James addressing “matters relating to Negro Affairs,” particularly employment, in the wake of emancipation. The first two of these orders make substantial revisions and reversals to an extensive landmark order (No. 46) issued by Major General.....
![Item #7825 UNIVERSAL RACES CONGRESS [caption title]. W. E B. Du Bois](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/7825_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1674156921)
An unrecorded notice advertising a speech delivered by W.E.B. Du Bois at the City Liberal Club (later National Liberal Club) in London in advance of the first Universal Races Congress of 1911. The Congress met the following month at the University of London and featured many prominent humanists from numerous.....
![Item #9059 The Liberator. [A Collection of 192 Original Issues, 1845–1862]. William Lloyd...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/9059_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1723740910)
An excellent, extensive run of Garrison’s fiery abolitionist newspaper, one of the most radical American periodicals of its time and certainly the most radical of any with a national circulation. Throughout its thirty-five years of publication, The Liberator championed not only the abolition of slavery and equal rights for African-American.....
Essays included in this volume are “Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers and Us White People”; “I Must Begin with an Explanation of my Presense [sic] in the United States” (better known as Genet’s May Day Speech, delivered before a crowd of some 25,000 people demonstrating in support of the Black.....
A Spanish-language booklet detailing events organized on the occasion of the 1957 Jazz Record Grand Prix between February 10th and 18th, 1958, evidencing the strong Spanish interest in African American jazz in the post-war years. The 1957 Jazz Record Grand Prix was co-produced by the Hot Club de Barcelona and.....
A detailed muster roll for Company G of the 64th Regiment of U.S. Colored Infantry while stationed in the vicinity of Vidalia, Louisiana, with content relating to illness, death, desertion and female servants. This document lists the company’s three white officers and eighty-six Black privates, in addition to eight deceased.....