By the Numbers: Black History

10
Number of Zora Neale Hurston plays—most of which were never published—held by the Library of Congress (LC) in Washington, D.C. The prolific 20th-century writer and anthropologist wrote the plays between 1925 and 1944, but they were not widely known until found in an LC collection in 1997.

15 million
Number of historical documents in the manuscript collection of the Amistad Research Center (ARC) in New Orleans. ARC is the country’s oldest and largest archive of African American history, with a collection dating from the 1790s to today.

5
Number of stops on the James Baldwin walking tour produced by New York Public Library (NYPL) in 2024. The tour, which includes a look at Baldwin’s Manhattan apartment and childhood library, was part of NYPL’s Baldwin centennial, celebrating 100 years since the famed author’s birth.

30,000
Number of copies of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave sold between 1845 and 1860. The bestseller was the first of three autobiographies Douglass wrote.

27
Number of photos from the personal collection of civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells held by University of Chicago Library’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. The photos include portraits and Wells with family members.

1950
Year that Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black Pulitzer Prize winner for her book Annie Allen. Brooks was also the first Black woman to serve as LC’s poetry consultant (1985–1986).

13,000
Number of items in Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, housed at Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. Collection highlights include early drafts of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, correspondence between him and US presidents, and other personal materials.