Collections in Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division

The Miscellaneous Afro-Latin American collection consists of a mix of official, private, and family papers from colonial Spanish American territories: Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The documents are all from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for a chronology of the history of blacks in Uruguay from 1680-1990. less

A collection of bills of sale, deeds, passes, certificates of registry, manumission papers, wills, and speeches. Also, letters relating to slavery-related court cases, including the Amistad slave ship revolt. Also includes letters by prominent abolitionists William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and William Lloyd Garrison with their views and comments on the abolition movement. less

The collection consists of individual items and small groups of Haitian documents mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. It includes miscellaneous correspondence of Etienne Polvérel and Félicité Sonthonax, members of the Civil Commission sent by the French government to the Windward Islands "to restore order and tranquillity" in 1793, and of various Haitian heads of state, among them Nissage Saget (1874), Lysius Félicité Salomon (1883) and Tirésias Simon Sam (1897). Also included are a 1778 inventory listing the names, age, trades and physical condition of 149 slaves on the Beaugé Plantation in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue; a 1785 manumission certificate for Jeanne Aline, a sixteen year-old slave girl; miscellaneous French colonial administration documents ranging from 1791 to 1803; two letters from Henri Christophe to Tobias Lear, U.S. Consul to Saint-Domingue in 1802, and to Corneille Brelle, a French priest appointed Grand Almoner and Archbishop of Haiti in 1811; 1830s Masonic certificates from the Grande Loge d'Haiti; and a group of six autograph letters with attachments from the Haitian surrealist poet Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude (1968-1970). Diplomatic correspondence includes 35 letters from the Haitian Legation in Paris to the Haitian Ministry of Foreign Relations, 1911-1914, relating to the purchase of 10,000 guns and 500,000 rounds of ammunition in France, and to a 36-hour British ultimatum to the Haitian government. Also a group of letters from the Haitian Legation in Ciudad Trujillo (Santo Domingo) that give a sense of the general situation between the two countries prior to the October 1937 massacre of 10,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic. less

The Grenada Plantation Records consist of manuscript documents from the Lataste Estate, a sugar plantation in Grenada, West Indies, dating from 1737-1845. The documents are in French, reflecting the fact that colonial control of Grenada changed hands several times during the time period of this collection. Included are deeds of sale, account records for running the plantation, inventories, survey reports about the property, total amount of rum and molasses produced, and detailed account books of profits and expenses, as well as letters and copies of letters, powers of attorney, a 1756 marriage contract, and a hand drawn folio map. Most of the letters were written by John Harvey and include correspondence regarding other properties, e.g. Estate of Rochambard and estates adjoining Lataste - Brienner and Chantilly. Inventories of slaves (last dated 1834, when slavery was outlawed) include information about illness, cause of death, first names, ages, and sometimes country of origin, color and conspicuous marks (such as amputations) and scars. less