Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The character was seen by many readers as a ground-breaking humanistic portrayal of a slave, one who uses nonresistance and gives his life to protect others who have escaped from slavery. However, the character also came to be seen as inexplicably kind to white slaveholders, especially based on his portrayal in pro-compassion dramatizations. This led to the use of Uncle Tom – sometimes shortened to just a Tom – as a derogatory epithet for an exceedingly subservient person or house negro, particularly one aware of his or her own lower-class racial status.
John Gabriel Stedman was a Dutch-born Scottish soldier and writer best known for writing The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). This narrative covers describes his experience in Suriname between 1773 and 1777, where he was a soldier in the Dutch military deployed to assist local troops fighting against groups of escaped slaves. He first recorded his experiences in a personal diary that he later rewrote and expanded into the Narrative. The Narrative was a bestseller of the time and, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonialism, became an important tool in the fledgling abolitionist movement. When compared with Stedman's personal diary, his published Narrative is a sanitized and romanticized version of Stedman's time in Surinam.
Slavery in Canada includes historical practices of enslavement practised by both the First Nations until the 19th century, and by colonists during the period of European colonization.
John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-slavery writings, as well as his 1866 book Snow-Bound.
Olaudah Equiano, known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa, was a writer and abolitionist. According to his memoir, he was from the village of Essaka in modern southern Nigeria. Enslaved as a child in West Africa, he was shipped to the Caribbean and sold to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more before purchasing his freedom in 1766.
Thomas Day was a British author and abolitionist. He was well known for the book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–1789) which emphasized Rousseauvian educational ideals, for his writings against slavery, for campaigning both for and against American independence, and for his project applying his educational ideals to young girls with the aim of raising a wife for himself.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free, whether of African or mixed descent.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Scipio Moorhead was an enslaved African-American artist who lived in Boston, Massachusetts. Moorhead is known through the contemporary African-American poet Phillis Wheatley's poem, dedicated "To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works", published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773. His full name was learned from period marginalia.
Jupiter Hammon was an American writer who is known as a founder of African-American literature, as his poem published in 1761 in New York was the first by an African American in North America. He subsequently published both poetry and prose. In addition, he was a preacher and a commercial clerk on Long Island, New York.
David Ruggles was an African-American abolitionist in New York who resisted slavery by his participation in a Committee of Vigilance and the Underground Railroad to help fugitive slaves reach free states. He was a printer in New York City during the 1830s, who also wrote numerous articles, and "was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time." He claimed to have led more than 600 fugitive slaves to freedom in the North, including Frederick Douglass, who became a friend and fellow activist. Ruggles opened the first African-American bookstore in 1834.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The free-produce movement was an international boycott of goods produced by slave labor. It was used by the abolitionist movement as a non-violent way for individuals, including the disenfranchised, to fight slavery.
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England is a collection of 39 poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first professional African-American woman poet in America and the first African-American woman whose writings were published.
Albery Allson Whitman (May 30, 1851 – June 29, 1901 was an African-American poet, minister and orator. Born into slavery, Whitman became a writer. During his lifetime he was acclaimed as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race". He worked as a manual laborer, school teacher, financial agent, fundraiser and pastor. He died in Atlanta in 1901 of pneumonia.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
John Bicknell, the elder, was an English barrister and writer. He was co-author with Thomas Day of the abolitionist poem The Dying Negro from 1773. Bicknell has also been credited with Musical Travels through England, a pseudonymous satire on Charles Burney.
Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis (1814–1884) was an American poet and abolitionist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She co-founded The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and contributed many poems to the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator.
Mary Birkett Card, was an Irish based British poet, abolitionist, and feminist, best remembered for her anti-slavery poem, A Poem on the African Slave Trade published when she was seventeen.
