About
The study of early black print culture concerns itself with more than the circulation of written texts; it is also about the degree to which literacy and access to print materials produced a compelling record of human responses to the historical events that shaped black identity. Such a rich tradition is deserving of greater scholarly attention beyond Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley. Through literary societies, black lending libraries, and the early black press, the circulation of print materials cemented black society. In them we see not only the development of ideas, but also their reception within the interiority of black community. They range from the quotidian, a hairdresser’s beauty book, a young girl’s notebook; to the sobering the last will and testament of a former slave; to the remarkable, the copybook of a black female poet writing at the time of the American revolution. They not only reveal the development of ideas, but also their reception and how they spoke to communities. The Blackprint is a digital exhibit of black print culture materials taken from Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library. Volume I spans the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries: narratives of the enslaved, early fiction and poetry, pamphlets. Each item reveals a different aspect of the lives black people led, whether in bondage or free, and the extent to which their resilience allowed them to inhabit public and communal spaces. The exhibit features items from the Phyllis Wheatley Collection, African American Miscellany Collection, and the Black Print Culture Collection. These documents reinvigorate the past by making new connections between print culture and what we know of the lived experiences of black people during the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Early black print culture reverberates in the present through its embodied challenge of the status quo, its strivings for civil and human rights, and its record of organized resistance. The items in this exhibit were selected with the hope of deepening public engagement with a rich legacy of printed materials that formed the foundation of black thought and larger American cultural history. The Declaration of Independence will never be read in the same way once considered alongside David Walker’s Appeal. Offering counter narratives to many assumptions of cultural history, they are lenses illuminating the print culture that shaped a people and recorded a cultural history.