The effects of slavery and cultural exchange among persons of African, American, Asian, and European descent have been so pervasive as, in many ways, to characterize the history of the New World since the 16th century. From its earliest days, the Clements has devoted considerable energy to documenting Anglo-American antislavery movements. The acquisition of the Weld-Grimke and James Gillespie Birney Papers in the 1940s formed the core of what has become one of the nation's most important collections for the study of the antislavery movements and since then, the Clements Library has collected assiduously in the broader field of African American history.

The current collecting policies of the Clements continue to emphasize the antislavery movements, but seek to document as well the daily lives of African Americans, free or enslaved, from the colonial period through the mid-20th century.

Scope and contents:

The African-American History Collection contains miscellaneous items relating to the history of African-Americans in the New World, slavery, emancipation, the slave-trade and the anti-slavery movements. The strength of the collection lies in documenting the white anti-slavery movements, however the collection is continually growing in size and scope.

Three bound items also stand out for particular notice. First, an important manuscript copy of Clarkson's Lettres nouvelles sur le commerce de la Côte de Guinée (1789-1790), prepared while Clarkson was agitating for the abolition of slavery in revolutionary France. Second, the minute book and an important series of three notebooks of the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society kept by its secretary, Harriet deGarmo Fuller. The M.A.S.S. was a Garrisonian organization active in the 1850s. Finally, the collection includes the minutebook of the United Sons of Salem (N.J.) Benevolent Society, an insurance and self-help society organized by the "free sons of ethiopia" living in Salem County, N.J., 1839-1867.

Among many noteworthy individual items in the African American History Collection is a series of letters and documents relating to the Ohio anti-slavery advocate, John Rankin, including several to his son, Rev. Adam Lowry Rankin, an autobiographical manuscript written when Rankin was 80, and a typescript of an obituary written by his wife, Mary. The collection also includes twelve letters of the Midwestern antislavery agent and editor, Alanson St. Clair; 66 letters of George Thompson to Elizabeth Pease; a journal of John Zug, an agent for the Pennsylvania Colonization Society; ships' logs from the Jamaican voyages of two slave ships out of Liverpool, 1790 and 1792; and miscellaneous letters of Jane Lowry Rankin, Gerrit Smith, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Martineau, James A. T. Ramsay, Benjamin Lundy, and British activist Thomas Clarkson.

Related collections:

The strength of the Library's holdings in antislavery and African American history make any brief listing insufficient. Among the larger and more important holdings relating to these subjects are the Papers of James Gillespie Birney; Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké; Owen Lovejoy; George Bush; Lydia Maria Child; the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society; Samson Adams; and the Haitian Collection, with many other collections relating to aspects of slavery as practiced in the southern United States and Caribbean.

The Book Division and Newspaper Division also contain very substantial holdings for the study of antislavery and African American history. Of particular note are extended runs of the Garrisonian newspaper, the Liberator, a representative run of the Colored American (one of the first African American newspapers in America), the first two volumes of the Anglo-African (an early African American periodical), annual reports of the American Anti-Slavery Society and several regional and state-level societies, and dozens of slave narratives, biographies, and autobiographies. Among the rarer items are copies of John Brown's provisional constitution of the United States (1858) and copies of the minutes of "Colored conventions" held in Detroit and Buffalo in the 1840s.

Provenance:

Acquired by purchase and donation, 1930-1998.

Recat. 7/98 rsc

Subject index to the African American History Collection

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