A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its...

Chapter 3 of "If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance," New York: Third Press, 1971.

Despite a long history of exalted appeals to man's inherent right to resistance, there has seldom been agreement on how to relate in practice to unjust immoral laws and the oppressive social order from which they emanate.

Anna Mae Aquash statement to the Court of South Dakota September, 1975

Article from The Black Scholar, Journal of Black Studies and Research Vol 9, Issue 7: Blacks & The Sexual Revolution, April 1978.

Darrow's Crime & Criminals, originally published by Charles H Kerr in 1902, is not only one of the greatest works by the greatest attorney in US history, it is also a little masterpiece in the literature of social criticism and the struggle for freedom. In a few pages radiant with the forceful eloquence and dry humor for which he was so justly renowned, Darrow offers the man in the street - or more precisely in this case, in jail - a crash course in the theory and practi...

This address is a stenographic report of a talk made to the prisoners in the Chicago jail. Some of my good friends have insisted that while my theories are true, I should not have given them to the inmates of a jail. Realizing the force of the suggestion that the truth should not be spoken to all people, I have caused these remarks to be printed on rather good paper and in a somewhat expensive form. In this way the truth does not become cheap and vulgar, and is only plac...

Source: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America,” The Arena 23 (January 1900), 15-24.

Taken from the third chapter of "The Reason why the colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition," published in 1893.

In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the civil rights era—and beyond. Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notor...

Speech by Frederick Douglass on the occasion of the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1888.

In 1888, Douglass visited South Carolina and Georgia and realized how little he had known about the true conditions of his people in the South. On April 10, soon after his return, he wrote to one of the leaders of a movement for encouraging the emigration of southern Negroes to the northwest: "I had hoped that the relations subsisting between the former slaves and the old master class would gradually improve; but while I believed this, and still have some such weak faith...

The status of the Negro was the focal problem of Reconstruction. Slavery had been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, but the white people of the South were determined to keep the Negro in his place, socially, politically, and economically. This was done by means of the notorious "Black Codes," passed by several of the state legislatures. Northerners regarded these codes as a revival of slavery in disguise. The first such body of statutes, and probably the harshest, w...

Harriet A. Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself(1 861). First printed in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1861. Reprinted as Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child; enlarged ed., ed. Jean Fagan YeUin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 68-71.

Jermain Wesley Loguen, Letter to Sarah Logue (March 28, 1860). First printed as "Mr. Loguen's reply," in The Liberator (Boston, Massachusetts), vol. 30, no. 17 (Whole no. 1531) (April 27, 1860), p.1.

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed “engineering of consent.” During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that woul...

Article from The Oberlin Evangelist, December 16, 1840 Issue.

Henry Bibb, Letter to William Gatewood (March 23,1844). In Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself(New York: Published by the Author, 1850; New York: Greenwood Publishing Company/Negro Universities Press, 1969). pp. 176-76.

This letter is a part of Black Abolitionist Papers Vol. III: The United States, 1830-1846, a five-volume documentary collection--culled from an international archival search that turned up over 14,000 letters, speeches, pamphlets, essays, and newspaper editorials--revealing how black abolitionists represented the core of the antislavery movement. While the first two volumes consider black abolitionists in the British Isles and Canada (the home of some 60,000 black Americ...

Article from the Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Vol. 55, Issue 07, December 2003.

David Walker's Appeal, arguably the most radical of all anti-slavery documents, caused a great stir when it was published in September of 1829 with its call for slaves to revolt against their masters. David Walker, a free black originally from the South wrote, ". . .they want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us. . . therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed. . . and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man who i...

In this reading, Gottlieb Mittelberger, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, describes in detail the plight of the indentured servant.