The collection includes documents dating from early America through the twentieth century. Monumental figures such as Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, W. E. B. DuBois, W. C. Handy, Ethel Waters, Dizzy Gillespie, Imamu Baraka, and Martha Jackson are represented, as are several complete musical works, by Francis Johnson and others.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 113 citations exist upstream.