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This spiritual illustrates the relationship between Christian allusions and imagery with the desire for freedom from enslavement.

This spiritual illustrates how enslaved people saw the Civil War through the lens of Christian imagery.

Regarded as one of the most important speeches in American history, it was delivered by Booker T. Washington as a plea for racial cooperation in the South during a time of deep racial prejudice.

Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.

In this poem, the speaker recounts his or her shifting view of the white man stoically standing between Tommie Smith and John Carlos during their medal ceremony in Mexico City for the 1968 Olympics.

This story follows a girl who befriends the first African American to attend High Point Central High School, as a result of desegregation. What begins as an unintended and awkward experience in the cafeteria, becomes a strong and admirable friendship.

Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.

After serving a 19-year sentence, Jean Valjean ends up on the Lord Bishop's doorstep, where he is offered a warm meal and bed to sleep in. Although he steals from the bishop, in the end, he earns redemption and a second chance thanks to the bishop's wise and caring ways.

In this specific passage, which comes from the book’s first chapter, Douglass describes his enslavers. The passage focuses on Douglass’s memory of his first encounter with the brutality of his enslavers.

In this passage from the autobiography, Jacobs describes her life as a teenager in the household of her enslaver. She describes the sexual advances of her adult male enslaver, as well as the jealousy and ire of her adult female enslaver those advances caused.