The Black Voices Collection at Duke University is a group of
autobiographical accounts of African Americans who lived during
the age of southern segregation. These first person accounts
speak to the silences that appear in the history of the
segregated South, providing written testimony about the texture
of black life during a period of profound repression. The
autobiographies of preachers, teachers, evangelists,
missionaries, lawyers, physicians, soldiers, politicians,
activists, journalists, and entrepreneurs, most of whom were
former slaves or children of slaves, provide ample testimony to
black survival and resistance to white supremacy in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accounts of their
travels, their efforts for literacy and education counter the
notion that African Americans placidly accepted second-class
citizenship until the era of the civil rights movement. These
texts are key sources in an emerging historiography that
complicates our understanding of power and politics during th