Black Print: African American Writing, 1773-1910
“Our Warfare Lies in the Field of Thought.” Black Print: African American Writing, 1773-1910 draws on Cornell’s rich Africana Rare and Manuscript Collections to highlight the many ways Black Americans have used print and the press as spaces for artistic expression, communication and organizing, antislavery activism, humor, education, civil rights, and more. These items, ranging from poetry collections and autobiographies to novels and newspapers, showcase early Black artistic expression, what Dorothy Porter described as the “beginnings of the Afro-American’s artistic consciousness.” The exhibit’s title takes inspiration from the 1847 National Convention of Colored People held in Troy, NY: “Of the means for the advancement of a people placed as we are, none are more available than a Press. We struggle against opinions. Our warfare lies in the field of thought. Glorious struggle! God-like warfare!” “We need a Printing Press,” they continue, “because a printing press is the vehicle of thought—is a ruler of opinions.” These organizers believed in the power of the written word to make substantive change, and they believed that they had to counter America’s distorted racist logic with the clarity of truth and new visions for the future.
Black Print offers a snapshot of a robust community of writers thinking actively about Black life and Black art—the beautiful and the sublime, politics and popular culture—primarily through periodicals, pamphlets, and other ephemeral forms. Before social media, before #BlackTwitter, there was nineteenth-century Black print. Beginning with Phillis Wheatley Peters’s poetic meditations on imagination and justice before the Revolutionary War, Black Print tells a story about Black literary experimentation that includes William J. Wilson’s Afrofuturistic “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” Frances E.W. Harper’s lyrical Black feminist writings, and Thomas and Robert Hamilton’s editorial innovations. It also tells a story revolving around Black families: the Hamilton brothers and their father, William; the reunification of William Still with his brother and mother; Comfort Jany, an enslaved woman, writing to her mother to tell her about her daughter’s birth; Charity Still’s daring escape to save herself and her daughters. Across the nineteenth century, Black Americans used print as a space for speculation, for dreaming freedom, for imaging new and different worlds for themselves and future generations.
Black Print features works in Cornell University Library’s Rare and Manuscript Collections by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sojourner Truth, and many more. Highlights include a collection of documents signed and owned by William C. Nell, annotated copies of Douglass’s autobiographies, proceedings from state and national colored conventions, and a handwritten poem by Harper.