  These considerations took various forms within and across the centuries. More than a few African and African-descendant persons would engage in concerted intellectual and practical actions directed against the enterprise of enslavement in all of its forms. Their considerations and articulations can be found in various repositories of philosophizings: in the lyrics and rhythmic structures and timings of various genres of music-making; in newspaper writings and pamphlets; in poetry and other modes of creative writing; in letters; in slave narratives and autobiographies; in the legacies and documentary histories of institutions, those of Black churches and church denominations especially; in those of women’s and men’s service organizations; in the documentary histories of conventions and convention movements; etc. For from the earliest instances of the enslavement of Africans in the colonies in the 1600s and continuing through the 1800–1865 Civil War between forces of the Union of North and East and forces of the Confederacy of the South, militant agitation for the abolition of slavery was a prominent endeavor among persons of color both “free” and enslaved, as were efforts to achieve greater respect and freedom for Black women from male domination and oppression and from sexual exploitation as well as from racism. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), a young, lettered house-slave in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote poems “on various subjects, religious and moral,” in one of which she expounded on the significance of “Being Brought from Africa to America” and extolled Christians to remember that though Negroes be “black as Cain,” they, too, can be “refin’d and join th’ angelic train” (Wheatley [1773] 1997). Aside from Wheatley’s highly polished and thoughtfully probing poetry, the fact that she had penned the verses prompted such disbelief that her master, and a prominent group of White men of the city, including the governor and lieutenant governor of the state, felt compelled to write letters to the publisher and the reading public to attest that Wheatley had mastered the English language and was, indeed, the author of the verses. Lettered articulation, in high verse no less, was a significant counter to claims of Negro inferiority, hence the need for legitimation of Wheatley’s writings by White persons of significant standing in order for those writings to enter a race- and gender-constricted literary public sphere.