AAAD 487: Intellectual Currents in African and African Diaspora Studies : Primary sources

A landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major black leaders in North America. Works by teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures form the corpus. Unlike their white counterparts, black leaders have had to wrestle with the issues of their race alongside the issues of leadership in their chosen professions. They have been forced to defend positions, justify actions, correct perceptions, protest injustice, celebrate cultural achievement, and confront the agenda of a white-dominated society.

This collection focuses on race relations across social, political, cultural, and religious arenas; coverage is predominantly in Atlanta, Chicago, Brooklyn, and towns and cities in North Carolina. It includes pamphlets, periodicals, correspondence, official records and oral histories regarding integration, civil rights, and other subjects.

Between the early 1920s and early 1980s, the Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in widespread investigation of those deemed politically suspect. Black Americans of all political persuasions were subject to federal scrutiny, harassment and prosecution. The FBI enlisted black 'confidential special informants' to infiltrate a variety of organizations. Hundreds of documents in this collection were originated by such operatives. The reports provide a wealth of detail on 'Negro' radicals and their organizations that can be found nowhere else.

Composed of FBI surveillance files on the activities of the African Liberation Support Committee and All African Peoples Revolutionary Party; this collection provides two unique views on African American support for liberation struggles in Africa, the issue of Pan-Africanism, and the role of African independence movements as political leverage for domestic Black struggles.

Amiri Baraka is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist. As a young man in the 1960s, Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) galvanized a second Black Renaissance, the Black Arts movement. The ideological and political transformations of Amiri Baraka from a Beat poet in Greenwich Village into a militant political activist in Harlem and Newark was paradigmatic for the Black Revolt of the 1960s.

Provides documentation collected by the FBI through intelligence activities, informants, surveillance, and cooperation with local police departments. These documents chronicle the activities of Republic of New Afrika national and local leaders, power struggles within the organization, its growing militancy, and its affiliations with other Black militant organizations.

Comprehensive source of current and historical U.S. Congressional material, including bills, testimony, reports, documents, selected prints, the Congressional Record, the U.S. Code, Federal Register, and the Code of Federal Regulations.