Primary Sources: African-Americans: Literature

"... is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable. Each individual title as well as the entire database can be searched to determine what these women had to say about "family", "religion", "slavery" or any other subject of interest to the researcher or casual reader."

"Marcus Bruce Christian (1900-1976) was a businessman, a writer and poet, teacher, and head of the "Colored Project" of the Louisiana Federal Writers' Project (FWP) at Dillard University. Although he had a limited formal education, Christian served as a librarian at Dillard University upon the conclusion of the FWP, and later as a writer-in-residence and special lecturer at Louisiana State University in New Orleans (now the University of New Orleans). Christian's extensive collection includes several versions of the history manuscript The Negro in Louisiana and the writers' project notes, nearly twelve hundred poems, personal correspondence, family photographs, lectures, and secondary materials pertaining to the black experience in Louisiana and beyond. "

"...ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. "