A typewritten circular from the Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations, chaired by Addie Waite Hunton, called a Fourth Pan-African Congress to meet in New York on 21–24 August 1927. It sets out three beliefs and invites recipients to attend and bring others.
What the circular says
This is a single typed page, signed by a ten-member executive committee and addressed from Room 688, Bible House, Astor Place. It names the dates, gives three reasons for meeting, and asks each reader to come and to bring others. The third reason carries the argument.
3. That such conferences undertaken in so spirit of racial exclusiveness and with no thought of agression upon the rights of others, but only with the earnest desire for light, freedom and self-expression for all men, are real steps for the social uplift of black folk, and that the day is far past when any man or group can speak for a people who are able and willing to speak for themselves.
Therefore, the Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations, with the co-operation and consent of many persons of prominence whose names will be published later, invite you and your friends to be present at this congress and to take part in it and to induce as many others to attend as you may be able to.
Who sent it
The signers are the executive committee of the Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations: Addie Waite Hunton as chairman, Dorothy R. Peterson as secretary, and eight others, among them Nina G. Du Bois and Eunise Hunton Carter, as the names are typed. The circular counts three earlier congresses, in 1919, 1921, and 1923, held across London, Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon. The copy survives in the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at UMass Amherst. FRAME lists the audience as a diaspora or minority public and the purpose as mobilizing.
How to read it
FRAME tags the call for glittering generalities. Light, freedom, self-expression, and uplift are named, and no program is attached. The promise that prominent names "will be published later" asks the reader to trust endorsements not yet shown. Those are fair notes, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis would have flagged the same words a decade later.
The context matters as much as the device. No government issued this sheet. It is a private committee using the mail, an office address, and its members' own names to call a public meeting on "the present condition and the future of the black race," in the circular's words. That is free association and peaceable assembly, the rights the First Amendment protects, exercised without asking anyone's leave. The line about no group speaking for "a people who are able and willing to speak for themselves" is a claim to self-representation. It is vague as policy and plain as principle.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Call to the Fourth Pan-African Congress, New York, August 1927. Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations of the United States.
- Wikimedia Commons, Announcement of the Fourth Pan-African Congress, 1927, from the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), UMass Amherst Libraries, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (published before 1931).
