I told him I was ready to die
Suzanne Scafe, 16 February 1989
These three titles are the first of what will eventually be a 30-volume set of writing by black American women in the 19th century. They are being published in an attempt by the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture to make more widely available some of their 100,000 bound volumes of writing by black Americans since the 16th century. Despite the legal constraints on reading and writing among slaves, there was a considerable body of work by black people – slaves as well as freemen – even before Emancipation.
