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Black Writers of the Founding Era

Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the American Revolution

Edited by James G. Basker and Nicole Seary

Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed

“A landmark contribution to our understanding of the era, opening readers’ eyes to important figures who, though not household names, are part of the founding generation. It will help spread a truth that has long been denied: The story of the Republic’s birth, and all the history that has followed, cannot be understood without listening to Black voices, which, in pushing toward a more perfect union, played a founding role in the America idea.”— Frank Barry, Bloomberg

Overview

Overview

News “It Is Men Who Have Got to Make the Law Free”: The Long March to Juneteenth
June 19, 2024

Video Black Writers of the Founding Era, with James G. Basker and Annette Gordon-Reed
February 7, 2024

Interviews “Someone Shone a Light Suddenly into the Darkness”: James G. Basker on Uncovering the Vital Voices of Black Americans During the Founding Era
January 5, 2024

For too long, African Americans have been left out of the story of the nation’s founding, their voices absent from the memory and celebration of the creation of the American republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era—by far the richest and most expansive anthology of its kind ever assembled—restores these voices. The writings gathered here reveal the complexity and dynamism of African American life and culture in the period and show how the principles of the American Revolution were seized upon and enlarged by Black Americans from the very beginning.

Here are writers both enslaved and free, loyalist and patriot, women and men, Northern and Southern: soldiers, seamen, and veterans; painters, poets, and preachers; cooks, hairdressers, farmers, and many more. Alongside such better known works as Phillis Wheatley’s poems and Benjamin Banneker’s mathematical and scientific puzzles are dozens of first-person narratives offering a variety of Black perspectives on the political events of the times. These bold and eloquent contributions to public debate about the meanings of the Revolution and the republican values that gave rise to it dramatize the many ways in which protest and activism have always been integral for Black Americans. Intimate diaries and letters, many never before published, tell more private stories, indelibly altering our understanding of the lived experience of this crucial time in our history.

A foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed and an introduction by James G. Basker, along with introductory headnotes and explanatory notes drawing on recent scholarship, illuminate these indispensable works. A 16-page color photo insert presents portraits of some of the writers and images of the original manuscripts, broadsides, and books in which their words are preserved.

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James G. Basker is President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written and edited many books including, for Library of America, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (2012).

Nicole Seary is Senior Editor and Director of Fellowship Programs at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Black Writers of the Founding Era is kept in print by gifts to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Berkley Family Foundation Foundation and from Elizabeth W. Smith. They also provided project support for the volume.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-734-5 767 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 366 Library of America Series

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