Lillian Roberts came to New York in 1965 during a peak in labor militancy led by state and municipal government employees. Teachers, social workers, and sanitation workers all fought for better working conditions, improved pay scales, and reformed social services. Roberts, an African-American woman from Chicago, was an organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and helped AFSCME's local D.C. 37 win the right to represent thousands of hospital employees. She led series of strikes at New York State hospitals to protest Governor Nelson Rockefeller's opposition to unionization. Her efforts landed her in jail for a month, where she found it hard despite gestures of solidarity from her fellow prisoners.

Immigrants and African Americans decisively shaped a multiethnic urban popular culture in the late 19th century, built in large measure on the emergence of vaudeville. Vaudeville blended slapstick comedy, blackface minstrelsy, and sentimental songs into a rich and highly popular cultural stew. Among the most successful vaudeville practitioners were two Jewish singers and comics from the mean streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Joe Weber and Lew Fields. Weber and Fields' routines usually featured broad stereotypes of German immigrants: Fields played "Meyer," the shrewd German slickster who wanted to "put one over" on Weber's "Mike," the dumb "Dutch" newcomer. At the peak of their popularity in 1904, Weber and Fields recorded this popular routine, "The Drinking Scene," for commercial sale. Ironically, just a few months after recording this routine, the Weber and Fields team broke up, ending nearly three decades of public performances, the longest of any team in American popular theater.

Lewis Douglass was a son of Frederick Douglass and a sergeant in the Union army's Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. The Fifty-fourth, led by its white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, scion of a prominent Boston family, was an elite black regiment. On July 18, 1863, the Fifty-fourth mounted a brave but hopeless attack against Fort Wagner, which guarded Charleston Harbor. Shaw and almost half the regiment were killed. African Americans had already proven themselves in Civil War battles, but the battle at Fort Wagner turned the public's attention to the heroism of black soldiers. In this letter to the woman he later married, Douglass, still unaware of the dimensions of his regiment's losses, described the battle.

Jack O'Dell was a union organizer, a civil rights leader, and a member of the Communist Party. His political consciousness formed in the 1940's, when the African-American community became more assertive in their efforts to improve conditions and expand civil rights. Like many blacks, including one of his role models, Paul Robeson, O'Dell was drawn to the Communist Party because of their staunch stand against racism and segregation. During the 1940's, O'Dell found a welcoming environment in the National Maritime Union. Later, he worked for the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Counsel (SCLC) office in New York, before becoming SCLC's voter registration director in seven southern states.

The American soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp had powerful reactions to what they saw, often shaped by their own backgrounds. Leon Bass was a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant serving in a segregated army unit when he encountered the "walking dead" of Buchenwald. Like many others, he tried to repress his memories of the horrors that he saw there and "never talked about it all." But in the 1960s, while involved in the Civil Rights movement and teaching, he met a Holocaust survivor and felt moved to declare to his students that "I was there, I saw." In this interview with Pam Sporn and her students, he linked the oppression of the Jews and other Nazi victims with the segregation and discrimination faced by African Americans.

Thousands of free and escaped African Americans played significant roles in the antebellum abolitionist movement. Henry Bibb was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1815. His autobiography recounted his sufferings, escapes, recapture, and efforts to free his family. Upon his final escape he became active in politics. He was a founder of the Liberty Party in 1840 in Michigan and the Free Soil Party in 1848. While attending a political convention, he contacted his former master in Kentucky and began a correspondence, excerpted here. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress in 1850, Bibb fled to Canada and helped form the Refugee's Home colony for escaped slaves.

While most working-class autobiographers followed the example of Benjamin Franklin and portrayed the "industrious apprentice," William Otter showed another side of plebian life. Otter took his readers into the world of heavy drinking and nativist violence of antebellum urban life. Cities increasingly became unruly places to govern in the decades before the Civil War with their rapid population growth and jostling of immigrant and native born. Competition for jobs and just plain scapegoating led to brawls between native-born, foreign, and African-Americans workers. Otter participated in the urban diversions made possible by the new commercial culture such as boxing, baseball and other sports, or games at local taverns, along with the competitions between rival militia companies and neighborhood street gangs. All of these boisterous activities could turn violent. Otter was born in England and impressed into the British navy. He jumped ship and came to New York in 1831. While apprenticed as a plasterer, he entered a world of masculine culture that he colorfully displayed in his History of My Own Times (1835).

Jack O'Dell was one of many young black servicemen who returned from World War II determined to change conditions for African Americans at home. Along with veterans, African Americans who had participated in wartime industries and union organizing, and who had experienced improvements in pay and education, became more assertive in their demands for equality. As a member of the National Maritime Union, O'Dell participated in union organizing and challenging racial discrimination. Later, he used his job as an insurance agent to speak with African Americans in their homes, encouraging them to register to vote. These activities formed a basis for his participation in the Civil Rights Movement, during which he directed the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

This collection uses primary sources to explore Ida B. Wells and anti-lynching activism. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city's poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans--their rivals in the city's labor market--for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York's devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

Hundreds of writers and artists lived in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and were part of a vibrant, creative community that found its voice in what came to be called the "Harlem Renaissance." Alain Locke's 1925 collection The New Negro --a compilation of literature by and essays about "New Negro" artists and black culture--became a "manifesto" of the movement. Some of black America's foremost writers contributed stories and poems to the volume. The work of these artists drew upon the African-American experience and expressed a new pride in black racial identity and heritage. Several factors accounted for the birth of the movement and propelled it forward. By 1920 the once white ethnic neighborhood of Harlem in upper Manhattan overflowed with recent African-American migrants from the South and the Caribbean. Black soldiers returning from World War I shared a new sense of pride, militancy, and entitlement, as expressed in Claude McKay's 1919 protest poem "If We Must Die."

Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey recognized that his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) would find its most enthusiastic audience in the United States, despite the organization's professed worldwide mission. After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to find intensified discrimination, segregation, racial violence, and hostile relations with white Americans. Sensing growing frustration, Garvey used his considerable charisma to attract thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers and became the most popular black leader in America in the early 1920s. The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. To this end, the movement offered in its "Back to Africa" campaign a powerful message of black pride and economic self-sufficiency. In Garvey's 1921 speech, "If You Believe the Negro Has a Soul," he emphasized the inevitability of racial antagonism and the hopelessness of interracial coexistence.

For centuries pirates, known as the Barbary pirates, operated out of the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. European states paid tribute to them to ensure their people's safe passage. Without British protection and with few financial or diplomatic resources, the new American nation's ships and citizens were vulnerable on the high seas. Between 1785 and 1820, more than 700 Americans were taken hostage and often enslaved. The American public was fascinated by these captives' stories; their tales of desert cities, caravans, and harems bridged the previously popular Puritan captivity narratives and emerging slave narratives. The most influential of all these American Barbary narratives was James Riley's Loss of the American Brig Commerce. A Connecticut sea captain, Riley ran aground in 1815 and was captured by wandering Arabs. He used his enslavement to call into question the enslavement of Africans and express a common humanity with the desert people he encountered.

Immigrants and African Americans decisively shaped a multiethnic urban popular culture in the late 19th century, built in large measure on the emergence of vaudeville. Vaudeville blended slapstick comedy, blackface minstrelsy, and sentimental songs into a rich and highly popular cultural stew. Among the most successful vaudeville practitioners were two Jewish singers and comics from the mean streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Joe Weber and Lew Fields. Weber and Fields' routines usually featured broad stereotypes of German immigrants: Fields played "Meyer," the shrewd German slickster who wanted to "put one over" on Weber's "Mike," the dumb "Dutch" newcomer. At the peak of their popularity in 1904, Weber and Fields recorded this popular routine, "The Hypnotist," for commercial sale. Ironically, just a few months after recording this routine, the Weber and Fields team broke up, ending nearly three decades of public performances, the longest of any team in American popular theater.

After Reconstruction, most African Americans remained in the South and worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. But the limited economic possibilities, as well as escalating racial repression that accompanied the end of Reconstruction and the rise of a "redeemed" South, led some to move West. Kansas was the most common destination for southern black "Exodusters" as they were called, and more than 26,000 African-Americans immigrated to Kansas during the l870s. The Exodusters hoped to create quasi-utopian colonies entirely free from white control. The best known of these black settlements was Nicodemus, named for an African-born slave who was said to have prophesied the black Exodus. In this 1877 circular, town founders expounded on the enticements of Nicodemus with the hope of attracting "colored citizens" as new settlers. By 1880, Nicodemus had 700 residents. The colony enjoyed its greatest prosperity in the mid-1880s, but after that it suffered from a lack of rain and good rail connections. Still, the population continued to increase gradually into the beginning of the next century.

President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to explain the riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission's 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Unless conditions were remedied, the Commission warned, the country faced a "system of 'apartheid'" in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of "white society" for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums--primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing. President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In the following statements to a joint Congressional committee hearing on urban employment problems, two directors of community-based job training programs in Philadelphia and New York City described their efforts. Both emphasized the need for increased federal funding to support practical ways to implement the Commission's recommendations.

In 1852-53, the popular British writer William Makepeace Thackeray toured the United States. While he lectured to enthralled American audiences, his secretary Eyre Crowe meticulously recorded the trip in words and pictures. Crowe, who studied painting in France, later published an illustrated memoir of the U.S. trip called With Thackeray in America. Crowe included in his account a visit to the Richmond, Virginia, slave market where he witnessed and sketched a slave auction. As this excerpt demonstrates, his simple act of drawing the harsh circumstances of the slave trade was viewed by the auctioneer and planters as a threat. After his return to England, Crowe turned his sketches into a series of paintings that starkly depicted the auction and the subsequent forced separation of family members and friends.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from 1969, two migrant farmworkers from Florida and a UFW organizer from Washington State discussed their experiences and proposed legislative remedies to a Senate subcommittee. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

In one of the largest forced migrations in human history, up to 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to Europeans and shipped to the Americas. Most slaves were seized inland and marched to coastal forts, where they were chained below deck in ships for the journey across the Atlantic or "Middle Passage," under conditions designed to ship the largest number of people in the smallest space possible. Olaudah Equiano had been kidnapped from his family when he was 11 years old, carried off first to Barbados and then Virginia. After serving in the British navy, he was sold to a Quaker merchant from whom he purchased his freedom in 1766. His pioneering narrative of the journey from slavery to freedom, a bestseller first published in London in 1789, builds upon the traditions of spiritual narratives and travel literature to help create the slave narrative genre.

Many of those who took part in the student movement of the 1960's drew their inspiration from the African-American struggle for freedom. That was true for Cathy Wilkerson, who became involved in the civil rights movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963 while at Swarthmore College. She described her experience as a college student listening to Civil Rights leader Gloria Richardson as the event that changed her life. Wilkerson went on to work in the SDS national office and edited the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. In 1968, she moved to Washington DC to open a SDS regional office, and later became a Weatherman. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]