The Race and the American Story Reading List was created collaboratively by Stephanie, Adam, and multiple faculty colleagues in the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri. It forms the core of our undergraduate course and the basis for our community and K-12 school programming.
- The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
Declaration of Independence
Jefferson’s Draft of the Declaration of Independence
U.S. Constitution
Federalist 54
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
- Phillis Wheatley
“On Being Brought from Africa to America”
“To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth”
“February 14, 1776 Letter to Obour Tanner”
“March 11, 1774 Letter to Reverend Samson Occum”
- Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, “On the Three Races”
- Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I A Woman?”
Frances Harper, “Bury Me in a Free Land”
Frances Harper, “We are all Bound Up Together”
- Frederick Douglass
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
My Bondage and My Freedom, Chapter 17, “The Last Flogging”
“Our Composite Nationality”
“Prejudice Not Natural”
“Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln”
- Dred Scott
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision”
Stephen A. Douglas, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois”
- Failures of Reconstruction
Ida B. Wells Barnett, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases”
Anna Julia Cooper, “Has America a Race Problem: If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?”
- Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois
Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address;” “My View of Segregation Laws;” “The Fruits of Industrial Training”
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Declaration of Principles of the Niagara Movement”; The Souls of Black Folk
- Civil Rights Movement Part I
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me”
Malcolm X, “Message to Grassroots;” “A Declaration of Independence;” “The Ballot or the Bullet;” “At the Audubon”
- Civil Rights Movement Part II
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Power of Non-Violence;” “Letter from a Birmingham Jail;” “I Have a Dream;” “I See the Promised Land”
- Obama
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union”; The Audacity of Hope, Chapter 7 (“Race”)
