ON HIS SHELVES

With more than 6,000 volumes, C.T. Vivian’s book collection is one of the most extensive collections of black literature in the city. The collection, will soon anchor the Peace Column in the upcoming Rodney Cook Sr. Park in Vine City as the C.T. Vivian Library.

Here is a snapshot of some of the books in the collection. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral: Published in 1773 by Phillis Wheat ley ,“Poems ,” is the oldest book in the collection. Born in Africa and stolen to Boston as a child, Wheatley quickly mastered English and learned to read and write. When nobody believed that Africans had the capacity to write poetry, Wheatley was put in front of a panel of 18 prominent Bostonians — including the Reverend Charles Chauncey, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts — to prove it. Satisfied, they wrote a preface to the book. Vivian owns a signed edition.

“The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements: Published in 1863, by William Wells Brown, the book, traces the lives of men like Nat Turner, Crispus Attucks, Denmark Vesey and Henry Highland Garnett — who had, through “genius, capacity, and intellectual development, surmounted the many obstacles which slavery and prejudice have thrown in their way,” and “raised themselves to positions of honor and influence.”

Journal of Negro History: Was a quarterly academic journal founded in 1916 by historian Carter G. Woodson that covered African American life and history. Each edition, through the end of its run in 2001, is bound in green. Vivian has the whole collection.

The Penitential Tyrant; or, Slave Trader Reformed: a Pathetic Poem, in Four Cantos: Written in 1807 by abolitionist Thomas Branagan, the book is his stern opposition to slavery.

Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African: Sancho was a British composer, actor and writer. A former slave, he was seen as an“the extraordinary Negro,” and a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. In 1782, two years after his death, a series of 160 of his letters were published in a book, marking one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families. Vivian has a 1784 edition.