The present thesis is aimed to reveal how African Americans have tried to leave behind negative stereotypes and their inferior status in American history. I am going to examine two “silenced” African American voices who managed to gain membership in a social and literary forum and who attempted to implement their history and literary canon. I am going to portray African American endeavors, one in the middle of the 19th century under the influence of abolitionist movement and the other one in the second half of the 20th century, which were determined to reclaim agency in American social discourse and affect American history. The first half of this paper deals with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), which is a 19th-century slave narrative, edited by an abolitionist supporter and the other half of the current discourse examines Toni Morrison’s Nobel-prizewinning novel Beloved (1987), which I will label and treat as a neo-slave narrative. Furthermore, I am going to compare and contrast two literary genres: the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative, as I believe their literary and historical significance is undeniable and also carry additional meaning in this current thesis.