Scope and Content Note
The Black History Collection spans the years 1623-2008, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1800-1865. The collection contains letters, court records, legal documents, slave deeds, financial records, writings, family papers, military records, birth records, inventories, wills, ships' papers, and marriage certificates pertaining to African Americans from the colonial period to the early twenty-first century. Topics include the slave trade, abolition, fugitive slaves, manumission, emancipation, and freedmen. The material is arranged alphabetically by topic, type of material, or name and chronologically and alphabetically thereunder. Addition I contains apprenticeship papers, court records for slave trials, a muster roll for a company of black soldiers in the Union Army, and correspondence. A letter from an African-American soldier stationed in Germany after World War I describes his jazz band and club.
The files in Addition II include correspondence, legal documents, a commonplace book, genealogical material, broadsides, speeches, writings, newspaper clippings, and printed matter relating to slaves and fugitive slaves, free blacks, and civil rights. Letters of physician and farmer John H. Bayne who lived near Oxon Hill, Maryland, are to Robert Bruce, a manufacturer of artificial limbs, 1853-1854. These letters relate to Bayne's efforts to make an artificial leg for the slave of a neighbor and include an advertising broadside with instructions for measuring artificial limbs. Addition II also includes a commonplace book with entries by two individuals from Nashville, Tennessee, a plantation owner and a physician. Notes from 1832 to 1835 record the expenses of the plantation owner. The entries from 1866 to 1873 are made by the physician and contain notations of medical expenses of various plantation owners, including the medical care of former slaves and written remarks and notes that the doctor prepared on topics such as "the teeth and poison of venomous serpents" and cholera. The commonplace book also contains an 1859 letter of George Chase, publisher of The Masonic Journal, to Sidney Hayden. The bulk of the items pertaining to the twentieth-century civil rights movement relate to Mississippi, particularly Leflore County, and include poll tax receipts, speeches, a newsletter, newspaper clippings and a broadside of the Southern Improvement Council.
The files in Addition III include letters, legal and financial documents, slave deeds and freedom papers, military records, printed matter, and other material relating to the experiences of African Americans, including slaves and free blacks. Topics include African American soldiers serving in the Spanish-American War and the Civil War; slave trials and other proceedings; slave care and treatment; African American politics and voting rights; cultural and religious affairs, and African American consumers. Noteworthy items include a letter from a Union officer in the Civil War describing the treatment of African American soldiers and the petition of a free African American woman to become a slave.