Angela Davis: “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation”
A Student’s Guide to Essential Primary Sources
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Angela Davis: “Political Prisoners,Prisons, and Black Liberation”
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Abstract
In 1971 the civil rights activist Angela Davis was a prisoner in the Marin County (California) jail. There she wrote “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” published that year in a collection she edited, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. The essay marks Davis’s early commitment to prison reform and the liberation of Black prisoners. She was in jail at the time because of the death of California Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, who was shot with a gun registered in Davis’s name during a botched effort to free a prisoner from a California courtroom. Davis’s incarceration drew international attention, and she was eventually acquitted of all charges, but her life was forever marked by this incident.
Contents
- Chapter 1: Many Thousands Gone: Black Experiences in Colonial America
- Narratives of Estevanico el Negro in the Southwest
- Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother
- Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage
- “A Minute against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting”
- Maryland: An Act Concerning Negro Slaves
- Virginia: An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves
- Louisiana’s Code Noir
- James Oglethorpe: “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina”
- John Woolman: Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes
- Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz: The History of Louisiana
- Alexander Falconbridge: An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
- Venture Smith: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa
- Chapter 2: In Hope of Liberty: African American Life in the Age of Revolution
- Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation
- Phillis Wheatley: “His Excellency General Washington”
- Petition of Prince Hall and Other African Americans to the Massachusetts General Court
- Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery
- “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George”
- Chapter 3: Now Comes the Test: Race, Nation, and the Limits of Freedom in the Early Republic
- Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
- Richard Allen: “An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice”
- Prince Hall: “A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge”
- Ohio Black Code
- Letter of William C.C. Claiborne to James Madison
- Peter Williams Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”
- Laws of the Creek Nation
- Benjamin Latrobe: “New Orleans and Its People”
- Missouri Compromise
- Laws of the Cherokee Nation
- Zephaniah Kingsley: “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society”
- “Jim Crow”
- James Creecy: “Language, Dances, Etc. in New Orleans”
- John C. Calhoun: “Slavery a Positive Good”
- Victor Séjour: “The Mulatto”
- United States v. Amistad
- Salmon P. Chase: Reclamation of Fugitives from Service
- Oregon Exclusion Law
- Charles K. Whipple: “Slavery among the Cherokees and Chocktaws”
- Chapter 4: There Is a River: Abolitionism and Black Protest in Antebellum America
- Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm: First Freedom’s Journal Editorial
- David Walker: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
- William Lloyd Garrison: First Liberator Editorial
- The Confessions of Nat Turner
- Lydia Maria Child: An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
- Henry Highland Garnet: “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”
- William Lloyd Garrison: “Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States”
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- William Wells Brown: “Slavery As It Is”
- Frederick Douglass: First Editorial of the North Star
- Frederick Douglass: Letter “To My Old Master”
- Bureell W. Mann: Letter to the American Colonization Society
- Sojourner Truth: “Ain’t I a Woman?”
- Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself
- Frederick Douglass: “Fourth of July” Speech
- Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
- American Colonization Society: “Things Which Every Emigrant to Liberia Ought to Know”
- Solomon Northup: Twelve Years a Slave
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Speech for the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society
- H. Ford Douglas: “Independence Day”
- Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Chapter 5: A Divided Nation: The Turbulent Fifties
- Compromise of 1850
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
- Dred Scott v. Sandford
- John S. Rock: “Whenever the Colored Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions”
- William Lloyd Garrison: Speech Relating to the Execution of John Brown
- Wendell Phillips: “The Puritan Principle and John Brown”
- Virginia Slave Code
- Osborne P. Anderson: A Voice from Harper’s Ferry
- Chapter 6: The Dawn of Freedom: The Civil War and the Reconstruction of a Nation
- W. L. Harris: Address to the Georgia General Assembly
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Frederick Douglass: “Men of Color, To Arms!”
- U.S. War Department General Order 143
- “An Ordinance to Organize and Establish Patrols for the Police of Slaves in the Parish of St. Landry”
- Arnold Bertonneau: “Every Man Should Stand Equal before the Law”
- James H. Payne: Letter about “Sister Penny”
- Thomas Morris Chester: Civil War Dispatches
- John Jones: “The Black Laws of Illinois: And a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed”
- William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15
- Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
- Convention of Colored Men: Address to the Loyal Citizens of the United States and to Congress
- Black Code of Mississippi
- Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks
- Wesley Norris: “Testimony of Wesley Norris”
- Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
- Henry McNeal Turner: Speech on His Expulsion from the Georgia Legislature
- Initiation Charge of the Ku Klux Klan
- Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
- Richard Harvey Cain: “All That We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights”
- Chapter 7: The Betrayal of the Negro: Black Accommodation and Black Protest in the Era of Jim Crow
- “The Largest Colored Colony in America”
- Frederick Douglass: “Our National Capital” Lecture
- Report of the Minority, in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States
- Pace v. Alabama
- Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1883
- Lucy Parsons: “The Negro: Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayers to the Preacher”
- Anna Julia Cooper: “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race”
- George Washington Williams: Open Letter to King Leopold on the Congo
- John L. Moore: “In the Lion’s Mouth”
- Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women”
- Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “Strivings of the Negro People”
- Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women”
- H. T. Johnson: “The Black Man’s Burden”
- James W. Poe: “The Slaughter in the Philippines and Its Relation to Massacres of Our People in the South”
- John W. Galloway: Black Soldier’s Letter from the Philippines
- James Weldon Johnson: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
- George H. White: Farewell Address to Congress
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Parting of the Ways”
- Ida B. Wells: “Booker T. Washington and His Critics”
- Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles
- Kelly Miller: “The Economic Handicap of the Negro in the North”
- Booker T. Washington: Letter to William Howard Taft
- Ida B. Wells: “Lynching: Our National Crime”
- Arthur A. Schomburg: “Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges, etc.”
- Monroe Trotter: Protest to Woodrow Wilson
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant
- “A Memorial to the Atlanta, Georgia, Board of Education”
- Chapter 8: If We Must Die: World War I and the New Negro Renaissance
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Migration of Negroes”
- Robert Russa Moton: “The American Negro and the World War”
- “The Colored Americans in France”
- “Africa and the World Democracy”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “Returning Soldiers”
- Claude McKay: “If We Must Die”
- “How to Stop Lynching”
- “The Negro and the Labor Union: An NAACP Report”
- “The Riot at Longview, Texas”
- William Pickens: “The Woman Voter Hits the Color Line”
- Cyril Briggs: Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood
- Walter F. White: “Election Day in Florida”
- William Pickens: “Lynching and Debt Slavery”
- Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”
- “To the World” (Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress)
- Jessie Redmon Fauset: “Some Notes on Color”
- Marcus Garvey: “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association”
- Claude McKay: “Soviet Russia and the Negro”
- Horace Mann Bond: “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda”
- Eric D. Walrond: “Imperator Africanus—Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?”
- Alain Locke: “Enter the New Negro”
- James Weldon Johnson: “Harlem: The Culture Capital”
- Marita O. Bonner: “On Being Young—A Woman—And Colored”
- Helene Johnson: “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”
- Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot”
- Zora Neale Hurston: “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
- James Weldon Johnson: “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist”
- Manhattan Medical Society: “Equal Opportunity: No More, No Less!”
- Carter G. Woodson: “The Miseducation of the Negro”
- Buck Colbert Franklin: “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims”
- Sterling Brown: “Ma Rainey”
- Chapter 9: Making a New Deal: African Americans, Organized Labor, and Shifting Political Alliances
- Elmer A. Carter: “Communism and the Negro Tenant Farmer”
- “Appeal of the Scottsboro Mothers”
- Cyril Briggs: “War in the East”
- William Patterson: “Manifesto to the Negro People”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “Marxism and the Negro Problem”
- Letter from Benjamin J. Davis to Samuel Leibowitz
- Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts”
- Walter F. White: “U.S. Department of (White) Justice”
- African Americans’ New Deal Letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt
- John Henry: “Landlord, What in the Heaven Is the Matter with You?”
- Richard Wright: “Blueprint for Negro Writing”
- Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”
- Folk Music of the United States, Album III: Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads
- Chapter 10: Double V: African Americans, World War II, and the Cold War
- A. Philip Randolph: “Call to Negro America to March on Washington”
- Bayard Rustin: “The Negro and Nonviolence”
- National War Labor Board: Case No. 771 in the Matter of Southport Petroleum Company (Texas City, Texas) and Oil Workers’ International Union
- Richard Wright: “The White Problem in the United States”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “An Appeal to the World”
- To Secure These Rights
- Charles Hamilton Houston: Petition in Hurd v. Hodge
- Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted”
- Civil Rights Congress: “We Charge Genocide”
- Paul Robeson: “Ho Chi Minh Is the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China”
- Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: Speech on Civil Rights
- James W. May and William Gordon: “What I Tell My Child about Color”
- Bayard Rustin: Montgomery Diary
- The Southern Manifesto (Declaration of Constitutional Principles)
- Paul Robeson: Testimony before HUAC
- George McMillan: “The Ordeal of Bobby Cain”
- Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”
- Charles C. Diggs Jr.: “Indifferent—or Irresponsible? U.S. Policy on Africa”
- Chapter 11: From Montgomery to Selma: The Modern Civil Rights Movement
- “Negroes’ Most Urgent Needs”
- Ella Baker: “Bigger than a Hamburger”
- George McMillan: “Mr. Local Custom Must Die”
- Jesús Colón: “Greetings from Washington” (from A Puerto Rican in New York)
- Martin Luther King Jr.: “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
- March on Washington Organizing Manual No. 2
- Martin Luther King Jr.: “I Have a Dream”
- Malcolm X: “Message to the Grass Roots”
- Malcolm X: “The Ballot or the Bullet”
- Fannie Lou Hamer: Testimony at the Democratic National Convention
- Moynihan Report
- Martin Luther King Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”
- Loving v. Virginia
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power”
- Kerner Commission Report
- Ella Baker: “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle”
- Ella Baker: “Developing Community Leadership”
- Interview with Gussie Nesbitt
- Jo Ann Gibson Robinson: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It
- Chapter 12: Say It Loud: Black Power and the Search for a New Radical Paradigm
- Carlos Cooks: “Hair Conking; Buy Black”
- Black Panther Party: “What We Want, What We Believe”
- Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”
- Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles)
- Piri Thomas: “Brothers Under the Skin” (from Down These Mean Streets)
- Hoyt Fuller: “Towards a Black Aesthetic”
- “Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism”
- “Mboya’s Rebuttal”
- Eldridge Cleaver: “Education and Revolution”
- Jesse Owens: Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man
- Statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement
- Angela Davis: “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation”
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Black Power and the Future of Black America”
- Ishmael Reed: “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto”
- FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad
- Chapter 13: From the Bullet to the Ballot: Black Politics in the Post–Civil Rights Decade
- National Black Political Convention: Gary Declaration
- Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel
- Time: “Cities: New Men for Detroit and Atlanta”
- Shirley Chisholm: “The Black Woman in Contemporary America”
- Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
- Thurgood Marshall: Equality Speech
- U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: “Affirmative Action in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination”
- Chapter 14: “I Rise”: Black Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality
- “Combahee River Collective Statement”
- Audre Lorde: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
- Melvin Boozer: Address to the Democratic National Convention
- Cheryl Clarke: “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community”
- Clarence M. Pendleton Jr.: “Comparable Worth Is Not Pay Equity: Looney Tunes and the Tooth Fairy”
- Joseph Beam: “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart”
- June Jordan: “A New Politics of Sexuality”
- Chapter 15: A Different World: African American Life and Politics at the End of the Millennium
- Jesse Jackson: Democratic National Convention Keynote Address
- Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission Report
- Jesse Jackson: “The Struggle Continues”
- John Conyers: H.R.3745: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act
- Anita Hill: Opening Statement at the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Clarence Thomas
- “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves”
- A. Leon Higginbotham: “An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague”
- Barbara Jordan: “Change: From What to What?”
- The African American Clergy’s Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS
- Colin Powell: Commencement Address at Howard University
- Louis Farrakhan: Million Man March Pledge
- Cornel West: “The Black Church Beyond Homophobia”
- One America in the 21st Century
- Clarence Thomas: Concurrence/Dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger
- Jesse Jackson: “The Fight for Civil Rights Continues”
- Chapter 16: From Katrina to Obama and Beyond
- Congressional Report on the Response to Hurricane Katrina
- Adolph L. Reed Jr.: “When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina”
- Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union”
- Barack Obama: First Inaugural Address
- U.S. Senate Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African Americans
- Barack Obama: Address to the NAACP Centennial Convention
- Tamara Winfrey Harris: “All Hail the Queen?”
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Dissent in Shelby County v. Holder
- Alicia Garza: “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”
- “Movement for Black Lives”: Vision for Black Lives Preamble
- Barack Obama: Farewell Address