This week’s blog post about Black History Month focuses on the spoken word of African Americans. The playlist, available from our streaming music service Music Online, is compiled from the Smithsonian Folkways archive of recorded performances. It features oratory, poetry, selected songs, and prose by African American musicians, writers, speakers, and activists. The selections illustrate the evolution of Black expressive forms and testify to the vitality and spirit of a rich cultural tradition.
I also want to draw your attention to a playlist of 96 African American poems that African American Studies and English Professor, Hans Ostrom, has recorded for YouTube. Images and text are included.
Music Online Directions: You may listen to the entire playlist (click on the icon 
to play the track) or listen to an individual track by clicking the links below. –Lori Ricigliano
Oral tradition:
- The Struggle: Sojourner Truth / Langston Hughes
- I’m Goin’ Up North / Children of East York School
Testimony against Slavery
- I Wonder Where My Brother Gone / Annie Grace Horn Dodson
- What to the Slave to the Fourth of July? / Frederick Douglass, read by Ossie Davis
Reconstruction and Repression
- Atlanta Exposition Address / Booker T. Washington
- Lynching Our National Crime / Ida B. Wells, read by Ruby Dee
Voices of Pride and Protest
- No More Auction Block / Paul Robeson
- The Children of the Poor, Sonnet 2 / Gwendolyn Brooks
The Sounds of Twentieth Century America
- How He Delivered Me / Juanita Johnson and the Gospel Tones
- Long Distance Calls / Muddy Waters
Voices of Civil Rights and Black Power
- Birmingham 1963 – Keep Moving / Martin Luther King Jr.
- Nikki-Rosa / Nikki Giovanni
Contemporary African American Voices
- Dope / Amiri Baraka
- For the Poets / Jayne Cortez