James L. Tolbert, Lawyer to Black Hollywood, Dies at 86 - NYTimes.com -
“Mr. Tolbert, a high school dropout, chose option 2, and went on to become one of the first black lawyers to represent black entertainers in Hollywood and to play a central role in an early effort to improve the way blacks were portrayed on film and to increase their numbers behind the scenes.”
“Cautiously advancing through the jungle, while on patrol in Japanese territory off the Numa-Numa Trail, these members of the 93rd Infantry Division are among the first Negro foot soldiers to go into action in the South Pacific theater.” May 1, 1944.
Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea
National Archives, Pictures of African Americans During World War II
Diaspora Hypertext: NEWS: Harvard to Digitize 18th and 19th Century Anti-Slavery Petitions -
Reblogged from African Diaspora, Ph.D.:
The Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University is digitizing eighteenth and nineteenth-century anti-slavery petitions:
“…Included in the thousands of petitions are first-person accounts of former slaves and…
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“(Among the soldiers hanged for rape and murder was Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.)” — Rape by American Soldiers in World War II France - NYTimes.com
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The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie production company organized by black film makers. The company was founded by actor Noble Johnson in May 1916 in Omaha, Nebraska. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition was the first of six movies the company produced between 1916 and 1921. The films were intended to create positive images of black people and black life in America, countering the explicitly racist images of white films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. The movies became part of a genre known as ‘race movies’ or ‘race films’, a genre that existed until around 1950.
Contrabands of War
African Americans crossing the Rappahannock River, seeking freedom behind Union lines.
Rappahannock, Virginia, August 1862.
Photographed by Timothy H. O’Sullivan during the second battle of Bull Run.
Library of Congress
Contrabands of War
Contraband school, ca. 1860 - ca. 1865
Created by the War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer
National Archives and Records Administration (ID: 524418)
(Source: arcweb.archives.gov)
Contrabands of War
Colorized stereograph showing escaped slaves gathered on the Foller Plantation in Cumberland Landing, Virginia
May 14, 1862.
James F. Gibson, photographer
Civil War Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
Contrabands of War
Former slave, photographed between 1862 and 1865
Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, Library of Congress
Contrabands of War
Freed slaves at the Headquarters of General Lafayette,” photographed by Mathew Brady
Yorktown, Virginia, ca. 1862
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
The term ‘Contraband’ was coined by General Benjamin F. Butler to describe escaped slaves. It was used to describe the thousands of slaves who sought refuge behind Union Army lines during the Civil War. Many of these men and women became laborers in support of the army’s efforts and, for the first time in their lives, earned wages.
“[Patsey] had a genial and pleasant temper, and was faithful and obedient. Naturally, she was a joyous creature, a laughing, light-hearted girl, rejoicing in the mere sense of existence. Yet Patsey wept oftener and suffered more than any of her companions. She had been literally excoriated. Her back bore the scars of a thousand stripes, not because she was backward in her work, nor because she was of an unmindful and rebellious spirit, but because it had fallen to her lot to be the slave of a licentious master and a jealous mistress. She shrank before the lustful eye of the one, and was in danger even of her life at the hands of the other, and between the two she was indeed accursed.
In the great house, for days together, there were high and angry words, poutings and estrangement, whereof she was the innocent cause. Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp. Gladly would Patsey have appeased this unforgiving spirit if it had been in her power, but not like Joseph, dared she escape from Master Epps, leaving her garment in his hand. Patsey walked under a cloud. If she uttered a word in opposition to her master’s will, the lash was resorted to at once to bring her to subjection. If she was not watchful when about her cabin, or when walking in the yard, a billet of wood or a broken bottle, perhaps, hurled from her mistress’ hand, would smite her unexpectedly in the face. The enslaved victim of lust and hate, Patsey had no comfort of her life.”
—
SOLOMON NORTHUP, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, 1853
National Humanities Center, On the Masters’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves: Selections from 19th- & 20th-c. Slave Narratives
Advertisement for a teenager, 15 to 16 years old.
New York, March 30, 1789
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
“Lights & Shadows of Southern Life”
On the back of the photo: “Aunt Martha and children, Slaves, Nashville”
ca. 1860
Created by:T.M. Schleier, Nashville, Tennessee
From: Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American collection,Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
(Source: brbl-dl-dev.library.yale.edu)
