Digital Librarian: African-Americans Digital Librarian: a librarian's choice of the best of the Web
Digital Librarian is maintained by Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York

African-Americans

See Also: Africana | Electronic Texts | History | Images | Music

Academy of American Poets - African American poets include:

Elizabeth Alexander - With text for Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Maya Angelou

Amiri Baraka - Born Everett LeRoi Jones

Arna Wendell Bontemps

Gwendolyn Brooks - Hear Brooks read We Real Cool

Lucille Clifton - Hear Clifton read Homage to My Hips

Countee Cullen

Rita Dove - Hear Dove read Weathering Out

Henry Dumas

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Cornelius Eady - Hear Eady read I'm A Fool To Love You

Nikki Giovanni

Langston Hughes -You can hear Hughes reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers

James Weldon Johnson - You can hear Arna Bontemps reading Johnson's The Creation

June Jordan - You can hear Jordan reading A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters

Etheridge Knight

Audre Lorde

Nathaniel Mackey - Hear Mackey read Irritable Mystic

Claude McKay

Harryette Mullen - Hear Mullen read Present Tense

Carl Phillips

Claudia Rankine - Hear Rankine read The End of the Alphabet

Ishmael Reed

Quincy Troupe - Hear Troupe read The Day Duke Raised: May 24th, 1974

Derek Walcott - Born in Saint Lucia, the West Indies. Hear Walcott read A Lesson for This Sunday

An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery - Passed by the Pennsylvania Assembly on March 1, 1780. (Pennsylvania State Archives Documentary Heritage.)

Affirmative Action and Diversity - Created by Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Department of English, University of California Santa Barbara, the site includes primary sources, legal documents and newspaper and journal articles.

African-American & Africana: Catalog of Microform - 104 page catalog (pdf format) of approximately 170 research collections and over 530 serials in the UMI/Proquest. Although you can not access the actual sources, the catalog does serve as a useful point of departure.

African-American Archaeology and African Diaspora Archaeology Resources - Created and maintained by Christopher C. Fennell, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

African American Cemeteries Online

African American Experience in Ohio: 1850-1920 - Ohio Historical Society. A Library of Congress/Ameritech award winner and also accessible via the Library of Congress American Memory Project web site.

African American History - Transcription from the historical sources compiled and transcribed by Terri Nelson, Princeton Public Library. Has a Name Index and African American Princeton on the Web.

African American Literature Book Club - Has Virtual Poetry Readings by E. Ethelbert Miller, Maya Angelou and Rita Dove. There are Author's Profiles and a list of Favorite 50 African American Authors of the 20th Century with a links to a number of interviews with the authors.

African-American Mosaic - "Library of Congress resource guide for the study of black history and culture."

African American Newspapers

Atlanta Daily World

Chicago Defender - "Founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Chicago Defender, for 100 years, has been the voice of the African-American Community in Chicago and across the United States."

Cleveland Call & Post - African American newspaper founded by Clevelander Garrett Morgan in 1916.

Detroit Free Press

Los Angeles Sentinel - "African American owned and operated newspaper that puts emphasis on issues concerning the African-American community and it's readers."

Michigan Chronicle - Detroit newspaper founded in 1936 is the "state's most respected African American publication. This award-winning weekly newspaper received the prestigious John B. Russworm for the "Best Black Newspaper in the Country" (voted by the National Newspaper Publishers Association)."

National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) - "NNPA, also known as the Black Press of America, is a 67-year-old federation of more than 200 Black community newspapers from across the United States." Provides a list of all sites affiliated with the BlackPressUSA Network and a list of member papers.

New York Amsterdam News - New York

New Pittsburgh Courier - "One of the oldest and most prestigious Black newspapers in the United States, with a rich and storied history. Established in 1907 by Edwin Harleston, a guard in the H. J. Heinz food-packing plant, the Pittsburgh Courier gained national prominence after attorney Robert Lee Vann became the newspaper's editor and publisher, treasurer, and legal counsel in 1910. In his lifetime, Vann saw the Courier grow to become the largest, most influential Black newspaper in the nation with a circulation of 250,000 and over 400 employees in 14 cities."

African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship - "Showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings..."

African American Oral Tradition - 60 minute lecture by Herbert Woodward Martin, professor of English language and literature at the University of Dayton, "explores the many threads of African American oral traditions with examples of songs, sermons, and poems." (Wired for Books)

African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907 - Library of Congress. Provides text of Booker T. Washington's address, known as the Atlanta Compromise, which he delivered at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition, at Atlanta, Ga., September 18, 1895.

African-American Research Library and Cultural Center - Broward County Library, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. See Dorothy Porter Wesley Collection.

African-American Sheet Music 1850-1920 - 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music from Brown University. (American Memory, Library of Congress.)

African American Theses and Dissertations: 1907-2002 - University of California at Berkeley

African American Writers: Online E-texts - Inez Ramsey

African-American Women - On-line Archival Collections - Scanned images of manuscript pages and full text of the writings of African-American women . (Special Collections Library, Duke University)

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century - "Collection of electronic texts has been assembled from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, focusing on the writers who founded the African American women's literary tradition."

African-Americans in the Visual Arts: A Historical Perspective - Exhibition at B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library, C. W. Post Campus, Long Island University.

African Diaspora Biography on the Internet - Joseph Caruso, African Studies Librarian, Columbia University. (Part of the World-Wide Web Virtual Library: African Studies.)

Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery - Companion to the six-hour public television series, the site "chronicles the history of racial slavery in the United States from the start of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century to the end of the American Civil War in 1865."

Afrigeneas: African Ancestored Genealogy

Afro-American Genealogical Research - Library of Congress

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820 - Provides access to Louisiana Slave Database and the Louisiana Free Database.

America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, 1935-1945 - Over 160,000 black & white and color photographs of rural and small town America during the late 1930s from the Library of Congress. "The images are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Created by a group of U.S. government photographers, the images show Americans in every part of the nation. In the early years, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. In later years, the photographers turned their attention to the mobilization effort for World War II." Photographers include Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Search for such subjects as:

Anacostia, D.C. Frederick Douglass housing project

Bethune-Cookman College - Daytona Beach, Florida

Church of God in Christ - Washington, DC

Duke Ellington

Harlem

Marcus Garvey

Paul Robeson

American Civil Rights Institute - "Based in Sacramento, California, the American Civil Rights Institute is a nationally recognized civil rights organization created to educate the public about racial and gender preferences."

American Colonization Society Daguerreotypes - Collection related to African American emigration to Liberia, contains thirty daguerreotypes of Liberian government officials and other colonists. (Library of Congress)

American Folklife Center - Holds the Alan Lomax Collection. Sponsors the Benjamin A. Botkin Folklife Lecture Series. Online videos include:

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues an illustrated lecture by William R. Ferris, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, February 17, 2010.

We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi presented by illustrator and journalist Tracy Sugarman. May 15, 2009. (54:48 minutes)

Documenting Katrina and Rita in Houston - Presented by Carl Lindahl and Pat Jasper, August 13, 2009. (1:10:04 minutes)

American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement - This is a valuable resource for schools and universities. Funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum & Library Services and by private donors, American Journeys is a collaborative project of the Wisconsin Historical Society and National History Day. For example, the text of The Voyage Made by M. John Hawkins Esquire, 1565 is available, and fully searchable, along with historical background, map, and information on how to cite the document. Hawkins was the first English slave trader. He made four voyages to Sierra Leone River between 1564 and 1569, taking a total of 1200 Africans across the Atlantic to sell to the Spanish settlers in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. See also National Maritime Museum

American Philosophical Society - "This country's first learned society, the APS has played an important role in American cultural and intellectual life for over 250 years." Founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1743.

Library - "Houses over 350,000 volumes and bound periodicals, eleven million manuscripts, 250,000 images, and thousands of hours of audio tape".

MOLE - Manuscripts Online

Resources in African American History

Isaac Jackson Letterbooks, 1839-1843. "Isaac Jackson managed several estates in northern Jamaica during the years of transition from slavery to free labor."

Slavery Collection, 1773-1888. - Created by Sol Feinstone "this collection of documents includes letters, broadsides, bills of sale, deeds of purchase, and wills, relating to various slaves. There are also documents from notable Americans concerning the slave question, such as John Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Andrew Jackson."

William Shedrick Willis papers, Circa 1940-1983 - "William S. Willis Jr. (1921-1983), anthropologist and ethnohistorian, contributed significantly to the understanding of the dynamics of intercultural exchange in a multicultural context."

American Slave Narratives - University of Virginia site has assembled samples from interviews conducted between 1936 and 1938 by the Works Progress Administration. Included is a sound file (in WAV format) of an interview with Fountain Hughes of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Amistad Case - National Archives and Records Administration site “presents documents related to the circuit court and Supreme Court cases involving the Amistad and offers suggestions for teaching activities.”

Amistad Research Center - Tulane University, New Orleans.

Amsterdam News - New York.

Anacostia Community Museum - Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution's museum of African American history and culture.

Archives of American Art - Smithsonian Institution. The Papers of African American Artists include "150 collections pertaining to African American painters, sculptors, and printmakers from the late 19th century to the present." You can Browse by Artist. Finding guides to African-American artists include:

Romare Bearden - The Romare Bearden Papers "have been scanned in their entirety, and total 2,217 images." There is a transcript of an interview with Bearden conducted by Henri Ghent, June 29, 1968.

Palmer Hayden - The Palmer C. Hayden Papers

"have been scanned in their entirety and total 4060 images", including "47 sketchbooks that Hayden compiled over an almost 40 year period. Pencil is the primary medium, but there are also some sketches in ink and watercolor. The sketchbooks contain sketches of landscapes and coastal scenes, including many from 1927 to 1932 when Hayden lived in Paris and Brittany, France. Some of the sketchbooks document trips taken by Hayden and include his travel notes and notes on his daily activities."

William H. Johnson (1901-1970)

Horace Pippin (1888-1946) - The Horace Pippin Papers "have been scanned in their entirety, and total 114 images" inlcluding Horace Pippin's Autobiography, First World War , an illustrated memoir of his military service in France.

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) - The Henry Ossawa Tanner Papers "have been scanned in their entirety, and total 2,471 images."

Alma Thomas (1891-1978)

Charles White (1918-1979)
There are also transcripts of oral history interviews, from 1964 to the present, with such artists as

Charles Henry Alston (1907-1977)

Emma Amos

Romare Bearden (1911-1988

Vivian E. Browne (1929 -1993)

Calvin Burnett

Robert Carlen (1906-1990)

Robert Colescott

Ernest Crichlow

Allan Rohan Crite (1979-1980)

Sam Gilliam

Peggie L. Hartwell

Humbert Howard (1915?-1990)

Richard Howard Hunt

Sargent Johnson (1888-1967)

Cliff Joseph

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)

Norman Lewis (1909-1979)

Edward L. Loper

Carolyn Mazloomi (1948-) - With transcript

Archibald John Motley (1891-1981)

John Wilfred Outterbridge

Gordon Parks

Merton D. Simpson

James W. Washington, Jr (1909-2000)

Charles Wilbert White (1918-1979)

Hale Aspacio Woodruff (1900-1980)

Arrest the Racism: Racial Profiling in America - News about racial profiling from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) - The ARSC Journal online Index and Journal provides full-text of articles from 1967 to 1994. Some articles include:

Belle Davis and her Piccaninnies: A preliminary bio-, disco-, and filmography - By Rainer E. Lotz, ARSC Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 178-191. “Belle Davis was an Afro-American song and dance artist, entertainer, choreographer, and director. She was a recording pioneer who toured Europe extensively during the period 1901-1929.”

A & R Men and the Geography of Piedmont Blues Recordings from 1924-1941 - By Christopher (Kip) Lornell and Ted Mealor, ARSC Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1 [Spring 1995], pp. 1-22. “With its roots in the indigenous "field hollers," work songs, fiddle and banjo tunes, and religious music of rural blacks, blues is distinctly regional and often reflects a sense of place.”

The Walls Came Tumbling Down: A Selective Discography of the Civil Rights Movement - By Les Waffen, ARSC Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 [1981], pp. 43-48.

Book Reviews: "Atlantic Records: A Discography: Duke Ellington's Story on Records, 1963-1965" compiled by Michel Ruppli - By Dan Morgenstern, ARSC Journal, 12:1-2 [1980], pp. 128-131.

Association for the Study of African American Life and History - Founded by the scholar Carter G. Woodson, ASALH established Black History Month.

Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record - Hundreds of images arranged in 18 categories (University of Virginia Library).

Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England - Electronic edition (in Documenting the American South) of the 1855 work by Samuel Ringgold Ward. Born into slavery in 1817, Ward was a lecturer for the Anti-Slavery Society, published the Impartial Citizen, an anti-slavery newspaper and taught at the Free Central College of McGrawville in Central New York.

In 1846 I became pastor of the Congregational Church in Cortland Village, New York, where some of the most laborious of my services were rendered, and where I saw more of the foolishness, wickedness, and at the same time the invincibility, of American Negro-hate, than I ever saw elsewhere. Would that I had been more worthy of the kindness of those who invited me to that place--of those friends whom I had the good fortune to win while I lived there--especially of those who showed me the most fraternal kindness during the worst, longest illness I have suffered throughout life, and while passing through severe pecuniary troubles. My youngest son, William Reynolds Ward, is buried there; and there were born two of my daughters, Emily and Alice, the former deceased, the latter still living.

Ward also describes his role in the Jerry Rescue Case in Syracuse.

Residing then at Syracuse, we went home, arriving on Wednesday, the first day of October. We found the whole town in commotion and excitement. We soon learned the cause. A poor Mulatto man, named Jerry, at the suit of his own father had been arrested under the Fugitive Law, had been before the Negro-catcher's court, had escaped, had been pursued and retaken, and was now being conveyed to prison. I went to the prison, and, in company with that true sterling friend of the slave, the Reverend Samuel J. May, was permitted to go in and see the man. He had fetters on his ankles, and manacles on his wrists. I had never before, since my recollection, seen a chained slave. He was a short, thick-set, strongly built man, half white though slave born. His temperament was ardent, and he was most wonderfully excited. Though chained, he could not stand still; and in that narrow room, motioning as well as he could with his chained, manacled hands, and pacing up and down as well as his fetters would allow, fevered and almost frenzied with excitement, he implored us who were looking on, in such strains of fervid eloquence as I never heard before nor since from the lips of man, to break his chains, and give him that liberty...

Bad Blood: the Troubling Legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia

Bancroft Prize - Awarded annually by Columbia University to the authors of distinguished works in either or both of the following categories: American History (including biography) and Diplomacy. Columbia University Libraries provides a list of Previous Winners from 1948 to the present.

Baseball and Jackie Robinson - Library of Congress.

Been Here So Long: Selections from the WPA American Slave Narratives - With lesson plans and other resources provided by the New Deal Network.

Beinecke Rare Book Library Digital Collections - Yale University. Images of manuscripts, letters, photographs, drawings, engravings, paintings, objects. Collections include:

James Baldwin Photographs and Papers Collection

The Black Panthers Trial: Courtroom Sketches by Robert Templeton

Langston Hughes Papers

Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection

Drawings of the Amistad Prisoners, New Haven

You can also search for individual photographs:

Harold Jackman in Morningside Park (1940)

Romare Bearden (1944 Apr 15)

LeRoi Jones (1962 Jan 3) - Later known as Amiri Imamu Baraka.

Robert McFerrin (1955 Feb 28)

Horace Pippin (1940 Feb 4)

Roy Wilkins (1958 May 27) - By Carl Van Vechten.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Billie Holiday

Paul Robeson

James Weldon Johnson

Zora Neale Hurston - Charcoal drawing by Amy Spingarn.

J. Rosamond Johnson - African American composer

Diahann Carroll

Jane White

Mary McLeod Bethune (1949)

Fredi Washington (1933 Mar 28)

BET - African American Web gateway, produced by the cable network Black Entertainment Television.

Black Abolitionist Archive - University of Detroit Mercy. "The collection housed in the archives contains a wealth of materials that document the lives of some 300 black abolitionists, including some 14,000 documents, an extensive microfilm library, a clippings file, and a library of scholarly books, articles and dissertations. Dr. James O. Horton of the Smithsonian Institution's Afro-American Communities Project has called it “the most extensive primary source collection on antebellum black activism.” " This is a good resource for locating 19th century newspaper articles on abolitionism.

Black Archives of Mid America - Project to digitize the largest depository of artifacts documenting the African American experience in the four-state area of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. The site is browsable and searchable. Currently (1/99) access is provided to the digitized images of 656 photographs, 67 letters, 10 documents, 3 artifacts, 9 articles and 19 publications. (Collaboration between the Black Archives of Mid-America Inc. and Kansas City Public Library, funded by the Missouri State Library.)

Black Collegian Online - Career site for students and professionals of color.

Black Enterprise Magazine

The Black Experience in America - By Norman Coombs. Originally published by Twayne Press in 1972 as part of The Immigrant Heritage of America. (Project Gutenberg)

Black Families of the Ozarks - 4 volumes with a keyword search. Greene County Archives & Records, Springfield, Missouri, Greene County Archives Bulletin Number 45.

Black Film Center/Archive - Indiana University.

Black Gospel Music Restoration Project

- Baylor University. "The purpose of this project is to identify, acquire, preserve, record and catalogue the most at-risk music from the black gospel music tradition. This will primarily include 78s, 45s, LPs, and the various tape formats issued in the United States and abroad between 1945 and 1970."

Black Magic - ESPN documentary on the integration of college basketball aired March 16-17, 2008.

Black Panther Newspaper Collection - "Some of the original writings of the Black Panther Party from its first three years of existence (1966-1969)."

Black Population in the United States - U.S. Census Bureau

Black Press Held by the Library of Congress - Compiled by John Pluge, Jr. January 1991.

The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords - PBS site about Stanley Nelson's 1999 documentary includes information on African American Newspapers and their publishers and founders, among which are John Henry Murphy Sr., founder of the Baltimore Afro-American, James H. Anderson, founder of the Amsterdam News, and Charlotta Bass publisher of the California Eagle.

BlackPressUsa

Black Studies - Subject directory created by Grace-Ellen McCrann, Cohen Library, City College of New York.

Black Voices

Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library - Denver Public Library. See Collection List, Biographical Information, and Finding Aids. The Denver Public Library catalog provides the following information on Omar Blair (1939-2004): "Born July 16, 1918. Tuskegee Airman. First African American president of the Denver (Colo.) Board of Education. Led effort to desegregate school system in the 1970s. Died March 25, 2004. Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library (Denver, Colo.) was named in his honor." Collection includes the papers of Eldridge Cleaver, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

Book TV - Provides a 2 month archive of shows including Arnold Rampersad author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography a 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, aired 2/16/2008.

Booker T. Washington Papers - "Searchable web tool is designed to provide researchers with access to thousands of pages comprising the 14-volume printed work, originally published by the University of Illinois Press." (History Cooperative.)

Booknotes - CSPAN's author-interview program, hosted by Brian Lamb ran from April 1989 to December 2004.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down by Rev. Ralph David Abernathy - October 29, 1989.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. by Charles Hamilton - January 5, 1992.

Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench by Michael Davis and Hunter Clark - January 3, 1993.

This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kay Mills - February 28, 1993

W.E.B. DuBois: The Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 by David Levering Lewis - January 2, 1994.

A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young by Andrew Young - April 3, 1994.

Colored People by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - October 9, 1994.

Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race & Identity by Clarence Page - March 17, 1996.

An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad by Claude Andrew Clegg III - March 30, 1997.

Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America by Randall Robinson - March 15, 1998.

Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis - July 12, 1998.

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams - October 11, 1998.

Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century by Randall Kenan - April 25, 1999

The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie: An African-American's Spiritual Journey to Uncover a Sunken Slave Ship's Past Michael Cottman - July 18, 1999.

To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Linda McMurry - September 26, 1999.

Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race by Eugene Robinson - November 7, 1999.

Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority by John McWhorter - March 2, 2003.

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 by Nikki Giovanni - February 8, 2004.

Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America by Christopher Benson - April 25, 2004.

All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education by Charles Ogletree - May 9, 2004.

The Cornel West Reader by Cornel West - February 22, 2000.

Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur by Michael Eric Dyson - November 4, 2001.

Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir by Dorothy Height - August 3, 2003.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 - Library of Congress collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.

Boston College Front Row - Streaming media archive of over 200 cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

Rethinking Black Identity - Lecture by Michael Eric Dyson, Avalon Professor in the Humanities, and professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania was given on January 31, 2005.

Internal Re-”sources”: The Just Society in the Black Literary Imagination - Lecture by Catherine John, an associate professor of African diaspora studies in the English department at the University of Oklahoma, was given February 7, 2005.

Fifty Years after Brown v. Board of Education

Contending Forces of Freedom: Race, Romance, and Reform in Antebellum Boston

Passing in Boston: the Remarkable Story of the Healy Family

A White-Collar Profession: African-American CPAs since 1921

Breaking Racial Barriers: African Americans in the Harmon Foundation Collection - National Portrait Gallery Exhibition, January 31 - September 14, 1997.

Brown v. Board of Education: 50th Anniversary Bibliography - Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). (Last Modified: April 27, 2004)

Brown v. Board of Education Online Resources - American Bar Association

Buffalo Soldiers on the Western Frontier - International Museum of the Horse

Buxton Historic Site & Museum - Last stop on the Underground Railroad in North Buxton, Ontario, Canada.

C-SPAN Digital Library - You can use search, advanced search or search by tag.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities Conference

- 9/01/2009 [36:00]

In Depth with Nell Irvin Painter - "Nell Irvin Painter retired from Princeton University in 2004, after teaching American history there for sixteen years. She is the author of six books: The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South; Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction; Southern History Across the Color Line; and Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. Ms. Painter has written numerous articles and essays and she edited Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Sojourner Truth's Narrative." 1/6/2008, BookTV [2:00:00]

In Depth with John Hope Franklin - "Professor Franklin has served as president of the American Historical Association, the Society for Historical Archaeology and Phi Beta Kappa, and has taught at Duke University, Howard University, the University of Chicago and other institutions." 10/1/2006 [2:58:00]

In Depth with Cornel West - "Professor West has written or edited more than twenty books, on topics ranging from religion and philosophy to politics and race." 1/6/2002 [3:04:00]

Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery - "Journalists Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank talked about the book they co-authored", New York Historical Society, 1 November 2005 [62.19].

Historic Sites of the Civil Rights Movement - June 13, 2009, National Archives & Records Admin., Southeast Region [1:13:00]

California Underground Railroad: A Digital Archive

CASBAH - "Research resources relating to Caribbean Studies and the history of Black and Asian peoples in the UK."

Center for the Study of Southern Culture - University of Mississippi. Among the Documentary Projects is Freedom Riders.

Cave Canem: A Home for Black Poetry - See their publications and links to resources on poets.

A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1873 - Library of Congress. This is an excellent resource for locating primary source documents, although it takes a bit of patience to navigate. Download Irfanview to enlarge the page images. The Congressional Globe contains the congressional debates of the 23rd through 42nd Congresses (1833-73) including the transcriptions of several congressional debates on the Fugitive Slave Law. The Senate Journal “should be seen as the minutes of floor action. It notes the matters considered by the Senate and the votes and other actions taken.”

January 24, 1850 - “The following message was received from the President of the United States by Colonel Bliss, his secretary: To the Sentate of the United States.” Journal of the Senate, 31st Congress--December 3, 1849 to March 3, 1851, p. 106-110. [California]

January 29, 1850. Journal of the Senate, pp. 118-119. Mr. Clay. [Compromise of 1850].

January 29, 1850, Senate, 31st Congress, 1st Session, The Slavery Question, Mr. Clay, p. 244-252.

February 21-24 1851 - Senate, 31st Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, The Fugitve Slave Law, Debate in the Senate, Millard Fillmore, Mr. Clay, Mr. Hale, pp. 292-325.

August 26, 1852, Senate, 32nd Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, The Fugitve Slave Law, Debate in the Senate, Mr. Sumner, pp. 1102-1125

To inquire into the conduct of T. W. Higginson [arrested June 12, 1854] in connexion with the attempt to rescue Anthony Burns [arrested May 24, 1854], a fugitive slave, from the custody of the United States officers in Boston, in 1854, p.241

Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection - Temple University, Philadelphia. One of the nation's leading research facilities for the study of the history and culture of people of African descent, the collection is searchable via the Temple University Web Catalog (be sure to select the Blockson Collection from the pull-down menu). There is an African American Studies: Research Guide.

Chicago Defender - "Founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Chicago Defender, for 100 years, has been the voice of the African-American Community in Chicago and across the United States."

Christine's Genealogy Website - Christine Cheryl Charity has assembled an impressive collection of links to African American genealogical and historical resources.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

- Library of Congress site allows you to "search and read newspaper pages from 1897-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present." Newspapers from California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia are currently available. See Library of Congress press release - Bringing Historic Newspapers to Your Desktop: The National Digital Newspaper Program. There is a list of available newspapers, including The Colored American (Washington, D.C.), which "began publishing in 1893 under the ownership of Edward Elder Cooper, who had distinguished himself as the founder of the Indianapolis Freeman, the first illustrated African American newspaper. The Colored American operated its presses at 459 C Street in Washington's northwest quadrant. The weekly publication promoted itself as a national Negro newspaper and it carried lengthy feature stories on the achievements of African Americans across the country. Publisher Cooper relied on contributions from such prominent black journalists such as John E. Bruce and Richard W. Thompson to sustain the national scope of his paper, which readers could obtain for a $2.00 annual subscription." You can Browse Issues.

Civil Rights Code of the U.S. - 42 USC Chapter 21 (Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School)

Civil Rights Documentation Project - University of Southern Mississippi Oral History department. With Interviewee Index and selected transcripts.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive - Database of resources on race relations and the civil rights movement in Mississippi. (University of Southern Mississippi Libraries.) The collection includes diaries, letters, transcripts of interviews, photographs and posters. It is a very rich source for primary documents. Try searching for Dahmer fish fry or Freedom Summer. The archive has over 250 photographs by Herbert Randall and there are transcripts of over 140 oral histories including:

Joseph E. Wroten - "Interview conducted on 11-04-1993 with Joseph E. Wroten (born 1925). Mr. Wroten became famous as one of only two Mississippi House Representatives who voted in favor of allowing blacks to enroll at the University of Mississippi."

J.C. Fairley, Mamie Phillips, and Charles Phillips - "Interview conducted on 06-24-1998 with J.C. Fairley, Mamie Phillips, and Charles Phillips, who were all active in the NAACP during the civil rights movement of the 1950's and the 1960's."

Charles Evers - "Interview conducted on December 3, 1971 with the honorable Charles Evers : mayor of Fayette, Mississippi."

Fannie Lou Hamer - "Two interviews conducted on 04-14-1972 and 01-25-1973 with Mississippi civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (1918-1977). Hamer was a leading figure in the MFDP. She is best known for her 1964 national television appearance in which she described the plight of black voters in Mississippi." [With audio clips]

Betty W. Carter - "Oral history. Interview conducted on August 17, 1977 with Mrs. Betty Carter at her home in Greenville, Mississippi. Carter was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She attended Newcomb College where she met her husband, Hodding Carter. Together they established two newspapers and purchased the third. "In their first newspaper, The Courier, established in Hammond, Louisiana, the Carters were known for opposing Huey P. Long. Opposing Long led to the downfall of the Carters' first newspaper and their move out of Louisiana. Betty Carter served as the first advertising manager of their second newspaper, The Delta Star. The Carter's eventually bought out the other local paper in Greenville, Mississippi to create the Delta Democrat Times. During the civil rights movement in the South, their paper became a voice of moderation in the South. This policy forced Carter and her husband to live under threats and in a state of tension for years."

Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse - University of Michigan Law School

Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System - Database of more than 230,000 names of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) includes histories of units and regiments and links to their most significant battles. Provides information on African American History & the Civil War.

Cleveland Call & Post - African American newspaper founded by Clevelander Garrett Morgan in 1916.

Club Kaycee: Jazz Sights & Sounds - From the sound archives & music collection of the Miller Nichols Library of the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Common-place - Offers a Special Edition on American Slavery, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 2001.

Community Memories: the African American Experience in Frankfort, Kentucky - "Featuring unique oral history recollections and over two hundred candid personal photographs collected from community residents, the book provides an enlightening expression of the black experience in Kentucky's capital." You can "search inside" this book at Amazon.com.

Continuous Commitment: African Americans in the American Red Cross

Coretta Scott King Book Award - American Library Association children's book award goes to "authors and illustrators of African descent whose distinguished books promote an understanding and appreciation of the "American Dream."

Daily Aesthetic: Leisure and Recreation in a Southern City's Segregated Park System -Boyd Landerson Shearer, Jr. explores African-American urban history and experience in Kentucky's largest cities, focusing on the parks and recreational spaces of African-American communities prior to legal integration of public facilities in 1956. With 178 images of Lexington, Kentucky parks.

Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860: Computerized Information from Original Manuscript Sources (CD-Rom) edited by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, this database provides names, birthplaces, skills, health and other information for over 100,000 Africans, brought to Louisiana from West Africa between 1699 and 1860.

Detroit Area Library Network - Online catalogs include the Detroit Public Library and the Detroit Institute of Arts Library.

Detroit Free Press

Digital Collection Celebrating the Founding of the Historically Black College and University

- "Collection of primary resources from HBCU libraries and archives. It includes several thousand scanned pages and represents HBCU libraries first collaborative effort to make a historic collection digitially available. Collections are contributed from member libraries of the Historically Black College and University Library Alliance." View collections by Participating Institution.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education - Magazine formerly known as Black Issues In Higher Education. You can search the archives. There is a section with Community College News.

DiversityWeb: An Interactive Resource Hub for Higher Education - Association of American Colleges & Universities. Publishes Diversity Digest and Diversity & Democracy.

Documenting the American South - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill collection of full-text primary sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. The site is searchable and has a subject, author and title index. Among the full-texts are Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England (1855) by Samuel Ringgold Ward and A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa (1896) by Venture Smith (1729?-1805), kidnapped at the age of six. DAS includes five digitization projects:

North American Slave Narratives

First-Person Narratives of the American South

Library of Southern Literature

Oral Histories of the American South - See sections on Civil Rights and Southern Women.

The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865

The Church in the Southern Black Community.

Dred Scott Case - Washington University Libraries exhibition offers records about the case from the Office of the St. Louis Circuit Clerk.

Dwight D. Eisenhower Library - Many events important to the history of civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Civil Rights Act of 1957) occurred during his administration (1953–1961). There are Finding Aids, Subject Guides, Digital Documents, Speeches and Oral Histories. See also 1st Term Bibliography Note on Primary Sources - The Presidential Papers The Eisenhower Memorial Commission, the contents list for the DDE Diary Series (58 pages) and the Ann Whitman Diary Series (18 pages).

Ellington at 100 - New York Times tribute includes essays, song clips, slide shows and rare video footage.

Encyclopedia Britannica Guide to Black History

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History - The subject index for African American History has extensive entries.

Encyclopedia Smithsonian: African American History and Culture

ERIC: Education Resources Information Center - "ERIC provides free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text. ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES)." Examples of full-text articles retrieved in an ERIC database search include:

The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War

Refusing To Defer the Dream: A History of the Black Heritage Public Library, Findlay, Ohio

Essence Magazine

Executive Order 9981 - Signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1948, the order desegregated the Armed Forces.

Exploring Amistad at Mystic Seaport

FBI Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room - FBI documents scanned from paper copies as released to FOIPA requesters.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mississippi Burning

Jackie Robinson

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

American Negro Labor Congress

Peekskill Riots

Nation of Islam

Roy Wilkins

Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences - Mitchell C. Brown.

Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War - "Teaching activities, historical documents, and photographs explore the issues of emancipation and military service."

Fisk Jubilee Singers - "Young men and women, vocal artists and students of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee who sing and travel worldwide. The original Jubilee Singers introduced 'slave songs' to the world in 1871 and were instrumental in preserving this unique American musical tradition known today as Negro spirituals."

Florida Folklife Project - From 1937 through 1942 Stetson Kennedy and Zora Neale Hurston traveled through Florida for the Works Progress Administration recording songs, music and personal histories of many ethnic and cultural groups. See also Sound of 1930s Florida Folk Life, an All Things Considered, February 28, 2002, story about the project. (Hurston's book Men and Mules is about the project.)

Florida Humanities Council - There are Radio Programs with an archive. African-American related segments include:

Fort Mose (January 2002) - No longer available

Charles Pace as Langston Hughes (December 2001) - No longer available

Ocoee: A Reconciliation (December 2000) - No longer available

Larry Rivers: Slavery in Florida (December 2000) - No longer available

David Colburn: Profile of a Public Scholar (October 2000). Colburn is known for his part in the investigation into the Rosewood Massacre of 1923.

Fort Des Moines Museum & Education Center

Founders' Constitution - Anthology of writings on American constitutional history edited by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner. A joint venture of the University of Chicago Press and the Liberty Fund, the book was published in 1986. (It is not clear from the explanatory matter just how much of the print version appears online.) "The documents included range from the early seventeenth century to the 1830s, from the reflections of philosophers to popular pamphlets, from public debates in ratifying conventions to the private correspondence of the leading political actors of the day." The site is searchable, contains a Table of Contents and an Index which includes Short Titles Used, Authors and Documents, Cases and Constitutional Provision. A few examples of pages of interest include:

Equality: St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery, in Blackstone's Commentaries (1803)

Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3

Jack v. Martin (14 Wend. 507 N.Y. 1835)

Sommersett's Case (20 How. St. Tr. 1, 80--82 K.B. 1771)

Frederick Douglass Papers - Institute for American Thought, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress

Explorations in Black Leadership - University of Virginia oral history project University directed by Phyllis Leffler and Julian Bond. Interviews include:

Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) - Interviewed by Julian Bond.

Free Speech TV - Video archives include:

Freedom's Plow - By Langston Hughes and read by Piri Thomas, December 31, 1997.

Danzy Senna - "Interview about her semi-autobiographical novel "Caucasia," which deals with the confusions and contradictions of growing up half black & half white-while passing as white-in 1970s Boston."

Aqeela Sherrills - June 4, 2004 (58 minutes)

Freedom's Journal (March 1827-March 1929) - State Historical Society of Wisconsin has made available the full text of the first African-American owned and operated newspaper. (OCLC#: 1570144)

Freedmen and Southern Society Project - Maintained by Steven F. Miller, University of Maryland.

Freedmen's Bureau Online

Fresh Air - National Public Radio show hosted by Terry Gross of WHYY of Philadelphia. With archives and podcasts. There are interviews with:

'At Canaan's Edge,' Martin Luther King's Final Years - Interview with Taylor Branch, originally aired on January 16, 2006.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (1/10/00)

Aretha Franklin (1/17/00) - No longer available

Christopher Curtis (/26/00) - No longer available

Michael Eric Dyson (2/17/00) - No longer available

Sonny Rollins (2/25/00) - No longer available

From Revolution to Reconstruction - Juxtaposes an outline of American history with the text of the original documents. Maintained by George M. Welling & Garry Wiersema, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Documents of interest include"

Dred Scott case - Court documents

The Black Lost Cause. Colored Service in the Confederate Army - By Peter Stam

Plessy v. Ferguson - 1896

From Slavery to Freedom: the African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 - Library of Congress collection presents "396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Authors include Lydia Maria Child, Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington." Items of interest include:

Letter of Gerrit Smith, to Hon. Henry Clay - New York : Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839 (54 pages).

Appeal to the Christian women of the South by A. E. Grimké -The Anti-slavery examiner, vol. I. September, 1836. no. 2, New York, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836.

Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York. New York, G. A. Whitehorne, printer, 1863. Describes events of the Draft Riot of 1863 and a fund raised to aid the victims. The committee formed to "consider the destitute condition of the colored people of this city, who have been deprived of their homes and their little property, by a mob, during the past week."

First organization of colored troops in the state of New York, to aid in suppressing the slave-holders' rebellion. Statements concerning the origin, difficulties and success of the movement: including official documents, military testimonials, proceedings of the "Union league club," etc., collated for the "New York association for colored volunteers," by Henry O'Rielly, secretary. New York, Baker & Godwin, printers, 1864. ""Eight months ago the African race in this city were literally hunted down like wild beasts. They fled for their lives. When caught, they were shot down like wild beasts. They fled for their lives. When caught, they were shot down in cold blood, or stoned to death, or hung to the trees or the lamp-posts. Their houses were pillaged; the asylum which Christian charity had provided for their orphan children was burned; and there was no limit to the persecution but in the physical impossibility of finding further material on which the mob could wreak its ruthless hate. Nor was it solely the raging horde in the streets that visited upon the black man the nefarious wrong. Thousands and tens of thousands of men of higher social grade, of better education, cherished precisely the same spirit. It found expression in contumelious speech rather than in the violent act, but it was persecution none the less for that. In fact, the mob would never have entered upon that career of outrage but for the fact that it was fired and maddened by the prejudice which had been generated by the ruling influences, civil and social, here in New York, till it had enveloped the city like some infernal atmosphere. The physical outrages which were inflicted on the black race in those terrible days were but the outburst of malignant agencies which had been transfusing the whole community from top to bottom, year after year."

FRONTal View: An Electronic Journal of African Centered Thought - Published by the W.E.B. DuBois Learning Center Press for the National Black United Front.

Frontline: Jefferson's Blood - "Thomas Jefferson, his slave & mistress Sally Hemings, their descendants, and the mysterious power of race."

Gallica - Text and image digitization project undertaken by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France consisting primarily of nineteenth century French texts, (although there are a number of texts in English and other languages). Click on Recherche and do a subject (sujet) search for any of the following words or phrases: Traite des esclaves, Esclavage, Mouvements antiesclavagistes, nègres, affranchissement, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti etc. Full-text titles in the collection include:

Three years in Europe, or Places I have seen and people I have met by William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave (London, 1852).

The history of the rise, progress and accomplishment of the abolition of the African, slave trade by Thomas Clarkson (London 1808).

De l'abolition de l'esclavage aux États-Unis: : La question américaine par Lucien Adam (Nancy 1861).

Recherches statistiques sur l'esclavage colonial et sur les moyens de le supprimer par Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès (Paris : impr. de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1842). Statistics on slavery in the French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Danish and Swiss colonies.

Gateway to African American History - U.S. Department of State. See also their African-American Experience.

Gerrit Smith Virtual Museum - 19th century philanthropist, social reformer and leader of anti-slavery activities whose papers are preserved in the Syracuse Department of Special Collections. There is also Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamplet Collection (1793-1875), with an index.

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition - Yale University Center has a Document Archive which "currently numbers some 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles. The documents are organized by author, date, subject, and document type." There is also a section of Bibliographies including Book Reviews Concerning Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition which have appeared in H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Givens Collection of African American Literature - University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities. Has a African American Literature Digital Images Database.

Guide to African American Documentary Resources in North Carolina - Edited by Timothy D. Pyatt.

Handbook of Texas Online - Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, the site is searchable and browsable There are entries for:

African American Churches

African American History - Biographical Entries

African American History Topical Entries

Juneteenth

Slave Insurrections

Harlem 1900-1940: An African American Community - Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro - "A Hypermedia Edition of the March 1925 Survey Graphic Harlem Number"; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Catherine Tousignant, University of Virginia Electronic Text Center.

Harvard University Library Open Collections Program - Among the digitzed texts are:

Harriet, the Moses of her people - by Sarah H. Bradford, New York: Geo. R. Lockwood & Son, 1897. "Harriet [Tubman] lives upon a farm which the twelve hundred dollars given her by Mrs. Bradford from the proceeds of the first edition of this little book, enabled her to redeem from a mortgage held by the late Secretary Seward." (Professor Hopkins, Auburn Theological Seminary, March 16, 1886, Preface, p. 13.) See the Appendix, pp. 133-150, for other letters describing Tubman.

Scenes in the life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah H. Bradford, Auburn [NY]: W. J. Moses, Printer, 1869.

The Philadelphia Negro : a social study by W.E. Burghardt Du Bois; together with a special report on domestic service by Isabel Eaton, Published for the University, Philadelphia, 1899.

Harvard Law School Forum - There are audio files of Past Programs dating back to 1954 featuring an impressive array of speakers including:

Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Future of Integration" - October 24, 1962

Andrew Young (Mayor of Atlanta; Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.), "Civil Rights with a Global Perspective" - April 8, 1984 (first few minutes missing)

Stevie Wonder - April 19, 1984

Rev. Jesse Jackson - Harvard Law School Forum Fortieth Anniversary Lecture - November 11, 1986

Maynard Jackson (Mayor of Atlanta) - April 25, 1990

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) - Artist

Heritage of Black Highlanders Collection [Manuscript Register] - D.H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Historic American Sheet Music - Comprehensive collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century American sheet music at Duke University has a section of Spirituals and is searchable.

L'Histoire par l'image - French image database portrays French history from the collection of various institutions including Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer. From the Recherche page you can browse by index, chronology and theme. The images are high quality and full of detail:

La Deuxième République abolit l'esclavage (27 Avril 1848) - François Biard

Jean-Baptiste Belley, député de Saint-Domingue á la Convention (1797) - Anne Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson(1767-1824). Collection of Musée national du Château de Versailles

Le plan d'un bateau négrier, symbole du mouvement abolitionniste (1789)

Le cachet de la Societé des Amis des Noirs

Histoire de l'esclavage

History Cooperative - Project of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the University of Illinois Press and the National Academy Press. Also at the site are the Booker T. Washington Papers, a searchable web tool "designed to provide researchers with access to thousands of pages comprising the 14-volume printed work, originally published by the University of Illinois Press." Searchable full-text journals include:

American Historical Review - from December, 1999

Journal of American History - from June 1999

Law and History Review - from Spring 1999

William and Mary Quarterly - from January 2001

History Matters: the U.S. Survey Course on the Web - "Designed for high school and college teachers of U.S. History survey courses, this site serves as a gateway to Web resources and offers unique teaching materials, first-person primary documents and threaded discussions on teaching U.S. history."

The history of Jamaica or, General survey of the antient and modern state of that island: with reflections on its situation, settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws and government - Google Books. See also Materials on the history of Jamaica in the Edward Long papers held at the British Library and Jamaica surveyed: plantation maps and plans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by B. W. Higman, 1998.

A History of the Amistad Captives - Electronic edition of the book by John Warner Barber, first published in New Haven, Connecticut in 1840. (Mystic Seaport).

Hayti District - African-American section of Durham, North Carolina, flourished from the 1880s to the 1940s. Includes images and audio files.

Holdings Project - Acronym for Holding Our Library Documents Insures Nobility, Greatness and Strength, the project will digitize items from Fisk's 7 million-piece collection of documents and artifacts.

Holsinger Studio Collection - Photographs taken by Rufus W. Holsinger record life in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia, from before the turn of the century through World War I. Approximately two-thirds of the collection are studio portraits, and among these are nearly 500 portraits of African-American citizens of Charlottesville and the surrounding area. (Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.)

Homecoming: Sometimes I Am Haunted by the Memories of Red Dirt and Clay - PBS chronicle of Black farmers from the Civil War to the present. Wisdom and Experience features RealVideo reflections on land and loss from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, the filmmaker, family members, an activist, a former slave, a scholar and a black farmer. Stories and Remembrances features RealVideo interviews with individuals about family, struggle, land and loss.

Horton Society - George Moses Horton was a poet enslaved in the Chatham County and Chapel Hill areas of North Carolina from his birth in the late eighteenth century until well after Emancipation. Additional full-text material on Horton can be found at the Manuscripts Department site at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

HotWired Interviews - Includes a June 1996 RealAudio interview with Spike Lee conducted at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

The Houston Mural of John Thomas Biggers

How Race is Lived in America - Special Section, New York Times Special Section (July, 2000).

Images of African Americans from the 19th Century - "Artists, engravers and photographers managed to capture and preserve for posterity a variety of images of African Americans throughout the 19th century." (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience - Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Internet Poetry Archive - Sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the North Carolina Arts Council., the site includes the written and spoken works of:

Margaret Walker

Yusef Komunyakaa

Internet Resources for Students of Afro-American History - Part of the larger American and British History Resources on the Internet maintained by William Vincenti: Reference Librarian at Bergen Community College.

Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University

Harlem History

Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists

- A rich civil rights resource. The Alabama Civil Rights Movement Collection consists of material on Johnnie Carr and the Montgomery Improvement Association, Demonstrations, sit-ins, surveillance, and arrests, the Selma-to-Montgomery March, the National Socialist White People's Party, and the Poor People's Campaign. The Southern Activists Collection includes material on John Beecher, Stokely Carmichael, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Charles Gromillion, Lester Hankerson, Myles Horton, and E.D. Nixon. There is a Guide to the Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists, 1941-2004. The collection is also accessible through the Pennsylvania State University Digital Library Collections. Highlights include:

Statement of the President of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the Rev. M. L. King, Jr. - December 20, 1956.

Troopers charge into the line of demonstrators - Photograph. Selma, 'Bloody Sunday,' March 7, 1965.

Selma to Montgomery March Speeches (March 1965) - You can hear Ralph Abernathy, T. Y. Rogers, Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, Ralph Bunche, James Forman, Boynton, Hicks, John Lewis, Whitney Young, Don Slayman, Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Hosea Williams.

Jackson Davis Collection of African-American Educational Photographs - University of Virginia Library project to to "digitize, identify, arrange, describe and conserve the ca. 4,500 photographs of African-American educational scenes in the southern United States taken by Jackson Davis during the period 1915-1930 when he was affiliated with the General Education Board in New York, New York."

Jacob Lawrence Digital Archive and Education Center - University of Washington project has a Catalogue Raisonné

John Brown

Harpers Ferry National Historic Park - Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

John Brown Farm and Gravesite - North Elba, New York, just outside of Lake Placid

John Brown State Historic Site - Adair Cabin State Historic Site and John Brown Museum in Osawatomie, Kansas. Kansas State Historical Society.

New York State Preservationist - Has an article about the Gerrit Smith Estate in Peterboro, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark ((Volume 5, No. 2 Fall/Winter 2001). In 1848 John Brown traveled to Peterboro, New York to meet Gerrit Smith. Smith had offered Adirondack land grants to poor black men.

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005) - By David S. Reynolds. "He [Reynolds] sees Brown as a visionary prophet of American equality, whose sins and crimes, though real, have to be situated in the bloody context of the run-up to the Civil War." (Adam Gopnik, New YorkerApril 25th, 2005); "It takes courage, if not a touch of Brownian madness, to argue, as David S. Reynolds does in his absorbing new biography... that Brown was not the Unabomber of his time, but a reasonable man, well connected to his era's intellectual currents and a salutary force for change." (Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review, April 17, 2005); "Does "John Brown, Abolitionist" add much to the major Brown biographies by Villard, Stephen B. Oates (1970) and Richard C. Boyer (1972)? Not really. The book is flabby with repetitions, frustrating loose ends and even entire passages that appear to have been recycled by mistake." (Lauren Weiner, Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2005).

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002) - By John Stauffer

John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (2004) - By Franny Nudelman

Cloudsplitter: A Novel (1999) - By Russell Banks.

John Henrik Clarke Africana Library - Cornell University library provides a special collection focusing on the history and culture of people of African ancestry. Has links to full-text Digital Historical Texts, Selected Full-Text Digital Periodicals and African American and/or Black Studies Online Catalogs.

John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture - "Building on the library's strong holdings in the areas of slavery, the slave trade, the abolition movement, race relations, and civil rights, the Franklin Center seeks especially to identify and preserve materials generated by (rather than simply about) people of African descent." (Duke University's Special Collections Library). There is a useful Guide to the Collection.

Journey Through Art with W. H. Johnson - Online exhibition from the National Museum of American Art. William H. Johnson (1901-1970), one of America's most important African American painters, is now being recognized as a major figure in twentieth-century American art."

Juneteenth - On June 19th, 1865, Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that all slaves were now free.

Kentucky African American Encyclopedia

Kentucky Historical Society - The The Martin F. Schmidt Research Library provides access to the online catalog.

Kentucky's Black Heritage - Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives e-Books.

Law of Slavery in New Jersey - Part of the New Jersey Digital Legal Library created by Rutgers University School of Law, "this collection includes texts, or links to texts at other sites, for all the published New Jersey statutes and court decisions about slavery. An annotated bibliography of statutes, cases, and secondary sources is provided, with links to the statute and case texts." Provides the text of An act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed by the New Jersey Legislature on February 15, 1804.

Libraries & Culture - With selected full-text archive. Articles of interest (in pdf format) include Autonomy and Accommodation: Houston's Colored Carnegie Library, 1907-1922 by Cheryl Knott Malone, Volume 34, No. 2 (Spring 1999), Toward a Multicultural American Public Library History by Cheryl Knott Malone, Volume 35, No. 1 (Winter 2000) and Integration and the Alabama Library Association: Not So Black and White by Kayla Barrett and Barbara A. Bishop, Volume 33, No. 2 (Spring 1998).

Library and Archives Canada - You can search their collection for underground railroad, abolitionists, fugitive slaves, Black Canadians, etc. Examples of materials available include:

Black Communities in Canada

Influence of the American Civil War: The Blacks, Anti-Slavery and the Underground Railway

Library Company of Philadelphia - Founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, the library "has one of the most comprehensive and sought-after collections relating to African American history spanning from the 16th century to the early years of the 20th century." The library's web catalog, WolfPAC, includes records for their Afro-Americana collection.

Library of Congress Online Catalog

Library of Congress Webcasts - See also Library of Congress Podcasts

Aubrey Ghent and Friends - 17 October 2007.

A New Challenge to the Congressional Black Caucus - Major Owens, 1 October 2007 [194 minutes].

Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950 - Francille Rusan Wilson , 13 June 2007 [47 minutes].

Speak Right On - Mary E. Neighbour, 6 March 2007 [66 minutes].

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America - Historian Henry Wiencek discusess his book. November 5, 2003. [Alternate url]

Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years - Patricia Sullivan, 30 March 2006 [42 minutes].

Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin - John Hope Franklin, 1 November 2005 [54 minutes].

Robert L. Carter - 24 September 2005 [26 minutes].

Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy's First Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality - Robert Schneller, 10 August 2005 [71 minutes].

Blacks in Advertising Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow - Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, 25 May 2004 [42 minutes].

A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in the Cause of Equal Rights - Judge Robert L. Carter, 25 May 2005 [ 61 minutes].

Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Laws That Changed America - Nick Kotz, 1 March 2005

Literature to Life: Zora! - 29 January 2004

John Lewis - 9 October 2004

Dorothy Height - 9 October 2004

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - 9 October 2004. Discusses "Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII?s Forgotten Heroes."

Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 12 October 2002

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America - Henry Wiencek, 5 November 2003 [31 minutes].

Images of Early African American Life - David Levering Lewis, Deborah Willis, 29 October 2003 [54 minutes].

Interview with E. Ethelbert Miller - 12 August 2002

J. California Cooper - 8 September 2001.

White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP - Kenneth Janken, 25 February 2003 [36 minutes].

Langston Hughes and His Poetry - David Kresh, May 14, 2003 [alternate url] - 12 September 2003

Larry Tye: Rising from the Rails - 2 August 2004. "Author and journalist Larry Tye discusses his new book, which explores the 100 year history of the black men who worked on George Pullman's railroad sleeping cars."

W. Ralph Eubanks: Ever is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi's Dark Past - 17 September 2003

Sharon Robinson: Jackie's Nine: Jackie Robinson's Values To Live By - November 6, 2001.

Library of Virginia

Library of Virginia Digital Collections - Provides access to birth, death, marriage, military and land records.

Cohabitation Registers

- Register of Colored Persons…cohabiting together as Husband and Wife on 27th February 1866. "Images of certain cohabitation registers are available here, along with accompanying full-text searchable transcriptions (pdf) of each."

Virginia Colonial Records Project - "Database provides access to information about historical documents relating to the colonial period in the Commonwealth of Virginia" and "contains more than five-hundred thousand (500,000) personal- name and ship-name entries."

Lift Every Voice and Sing - Special program to condemn the racially motivated burning of African American churches in the United States, was held July 1 1996, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Includes RealAudio sound files of many of the speakers.

Lillian Smith Book Awards - "To recognize and encourage outstanding writing about the American South."

Los Angeles Sentinel - "African American owned and operated newspaper that puts emphasis on issues concerning the African-American community and it's readers."

Louisiana Native Guards - James G. Hollandsworth provides information about the celebrated Louisiana Native Guards, the "first black soldiers in the Union Army during the Civil War."

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum Oral History Collection- Online transcripts related to African-Americans and civil rights include:

Charles Evers (1922-)

James Farmer (1920-1999)

Aaron E. Henry (1922-1997)

A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. (1928-1998)

Barbara Jordan (1936-1996)

Burke Marshall (1922-2003)

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993)

Louis Martin (1912-1997)

Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. (1911-1984)

A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979)

Roy Wilkins (1901-1981)

Andrew J. Young, Jr. (1932-)

Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1921-1971)

MAAP: Mapping the African American Past

- Columbia University site provides film and music clips, photographs, maps, and narratives to portray 52 historic African American sites and people New York City. They provide a place index, an image library and lesson plans. For an article about the site, see New Medium, Old Stories: A High-Tech Look at the City's Black History by Glenn Collins, New York Times, March 6, 2008. There is a video of Columbia University professor Kenneth Jackson describing Seneca Village which existed from 1825 to 1855 between 59th Street and 110th Street - the present location of Central Park - and was occupied by thousands of African-Americans.

Making of America - This digital library of nineteenth century books and journal volumes is "particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology" and is a good place to look for primary sources. This digitization project was undertaken at both the University of Michigan and Cornell University with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Search both collections; the Michigan collection consists of imprints between 1850 and 1877 and "currently contains approximately 9,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints" and the Cornell collection, which covers the period of 1840 - 1900 "provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles." You can browse periodical titles at Cornell and Michigan. Relevant full-texts include:

Speech of Hon. Daniel Webster, on Mr. Clay's resolutions,: in the Senate of the United States, March 7, 1850 - Compromise of 1850.

Proceedings of the United States Senate,: on the fugitive slave bill - United States. 31st Congress, 1st session, 1849-1850.

American slave code in theory and practice: its distinctive features shown by its statutes, judicial decisions, and illustrative facts by William Goodell, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853.

Boston slave riot, and trial of Anthony Burns. Containing the report of the Faneuil hall meeting; the murder of Batchelder; Theodore Parker's lesson for the day; speeches of counsel on both sides, corrected by themselves; a verbatim report of Judge Loring's decision; and detailed account of the embarkation (1854)

Case of Dred Scott in the United States Supreme court. The full opinions of Chief Justice Taney and Justice Curtis, and abstracts of the opinions of the other judges; with an analysis of the points ruled, and some concluding observations (1860)

Extracts from letters of teachers & superintendents of the New-England educational commission for freedmen, New England freedmen's aid society, 1864

Fort Pillow massacre (1864)

Inside view of slavery; or, A tour among the planters (1855) by C. G. Parsons, M.D., with an introductory note by Mrs. H. B. Stowe;

Negro in the American rebellion; his heroism and his fidelity (1867) by William Wells Brown

Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the reputed president of the underground railroad(1876) by Levi Coffin

Report [of] the Select committee of the Senate appointed to inquire into the late invasion and seizure of the public property at Harper's Ferry, United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on the Harper's Ferry Invasion, 1860

Some recollections of our antislavery conflict (1869) by Samuel J. May

Speeches and letters of Gerrit [sic] Smith ... on the rebellion (1865)

Twelve years a slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York (1863)

Malcolm X Project

- Columbia University

Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and Legacy of Struggle - Audio archive of the November 1990 conference held at Manhattan Community College, New York.

Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project - James S. Coleman African Studies Center at University of California, Los Angeles

Marian Anderson Collection of Photographs, 1898-1992 - Searchable database of 4,000 photographs at the University of Pennsylvania Library Center for Electronic Text & Image.

Marian Anderson: A Life in Song - Curated by Nancy M. Shawcross, Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. With Video and Audio Excerpts from Interviews and Performances.

Martin Luther King , Jr. Papers Project - Stanford University

Maryland State Archives - You can search their Underground Railroad Database in Beneath the Underground: The Flight to Freedom and Communities in Antebellum Maryland. See also http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/speccol/sc5600/sc5604/html/losim.html

Melanet - "Platform for intellectual, economic and spiritual expression of peoples throughout the African Diaspora."

Miller Center of Public Affairs Presidential Oral History Program - University of Virginia. An excellent resource for locating primary source documents describing the civil rights era. The Lyndon Johnson collection, for examples, consists of 787 items, among which is a 30 page transcipt of an interview with Hodding Carter, Jr. conducted on November 8, 1968 by T. H. Baker in which Carter "discusses his relationship with the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson , and his role in the civil rights situation in Mississippi". Other interviews of interest include those with Ivan Allen, Jr., Charles Diggs, Clifford Durr, Virginia Foster Durr, Charles Evers, James Farmer, Mack H. Hannah, Jr., Luther Holcomb, Barbara Jordan, Thurgood Marshall, Mrs. Ruby G. Martin, James M. Nabrit, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Hobart Taylor, Sr., Walter Washington, George L-P Weaver, Andrew Young, and Whitney Young, Jr., (1921- , ("Discusses his relationship with President Johnson and his role as Executive Director of the Urban League.") Citations are provided for all transcripts: for example: Transcript, Whitney M. Young, Jr., Oral History Interview I, 6/18/69, by Thomas Harrison Baker, Electronic Copy, LBJ Library. WhiteHouseTapes.org, also offered by the Miller Center, is described as the "The secret White House tapes and recordings of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower and has a Mississippi Burning, 1964 Virtual Exhibit. See also the Oral History Collection at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.

Minority Business Development Agency - "Federal agency specifically created to encourage the growth of minority- owned businesses", it provides contact information for Local Centers.

Minority On Line Information System (MOLIS)

Mississippi Digital Library - Cooperative project to provide a database of electronic finding aids to "primary sources associated with the civil rights era."

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center - Thomas C. Battle's history of this Howard University center is reprinted from Library Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 143-163, c1988.

Mostly Menfolk and a Woman or Two - Virtual exhibit of 18th and 19th century African-American literature. (Charlotte Hawkins Brown, George Moses Horton, Charles Chestnutt, David Walker, Anna Julia Cooper and Amar ibn Said.)

Motown Record Company

Multicultural Pavilion - Has a section on African American Literature. (Paul Gorski, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia.)

Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)

- San Francisco. Multimedia online exhibitions inlcude:

Slave Narratives

I've Known Rivers

Maafa: Remember

Etched In The Eyes: The Spirit of a People called Gullah

Photographs from the African Diaspora

Museum of Afro-American History - With information on various buildings and sites in and around Boston. li>My Bondage and My Freedom. - Full-text of the 1857 book by Frederick Douglass from the Making of America Project

NAACP Online

Naropa University Audio Archive Project - Boulder, Colorado. Nationally recognized writing and poetics collection called “one of the three most important literary audio collections in America” by the New York Times. Over five hundred hours are available online at the Internet Archive. You can listen to lectures and classes by Amiri Baraka.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave - Full-text from the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE

Nathaniel C. Standifer Video Archive of Oral History: Black American Musicians - Transcripts of 60 of the interviews are available online.

Nation Of Islam Online

National Academies Press - Has more than 3,700 free online books. Searchable and indexed by subject. Recent titles include

Understanding Interventions That Encourage Minorities to Pursue Research Careers: Summary of a Workshop (2007)

Measuring Racial Discrimination (2004)

Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (2003)

Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence (2004) - Chapter 8 - Police Fairness - discusses racial profiling.
In National Academies of Science - InterViews "distinguished scientists talk about their research, why they became scientists and other aspects of their careers." With Archived Interviews listed by subject area and member. Interviews include:

Lawrence Bobo - Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor at Stanford University, (recorded April 2005). "Bobo has made central contributions to both the understanding of racial attitudes and relations in the United States, and to survey research methodology through his studies of the causes and consequences of racial and ethnic attitudes."

Dr. Claude M. Steele - Known for his "pioneering research in social psychology has focused on self-evaluation and the impact of stereotypes." (Recorded 2004)

National Archives of Canada - Ottawa. Among the Digital Collections is the Anti-Slavery Movement in Canada. See also Anti-slavery Issues in Canada, 1830-1870: A Selective Bibliography created by the National Library of Canada.

National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ)

National Civil Rights Museum - Memphis, Tennessee

National Conference for Community and Justice - Publishers of Denouncing Racism: A Resource Guide of Faith-Based Principles

National Geographic - Has a section on the Underground Railroad.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

- Part of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Established by Congress in 2003, the physical museum does not yet exist. "The centerpiece of the NMAAHC Museum on the Web are the collected reminiscences of ordinary Americans. These stories, called "memories" are collected as text, images, and audio uploads in the virtual Memory Book where website visitors are encouraged to submit their own histories, traditions, thoughts and ideas."

National Museum of African Art - Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the "museum's primary focus is collecting and exhibiting the traditional arts of Africa south of the Sahara."

National Newspaper Publishers Association - Trade association, also known as the Black Press of America, was founded in 1940 to bring together publishers of African-American-owned newspapers, is a federation of more than 200 Black community newspapers from across the United States. Provides a list of all sites affiliated with the BlackPressUSA Network and a list of member papers.

National Park Service

American Civil War

American Visionaries: Frederick Douglass

War for Freedom:: African Americans in the Era of the Civil War

Harpers Ferry

National Portrait Gallery - Washington, D.C. Use Portrait Search to locate online images. (Remember to select Find objects with images only.) Exhibitions (past, current and upcoming) with African American themes include:

Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits

- October 19, 2007 - March 2, 2008. See Portraits of Resistance by Lucinda Moore Smithsonian magazine, February 2008.

Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture

- February 8 - March 2, 2008

Josephine Baker: Image and Icon - November 24 2006 - March 18, 2007

A Durable Momento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist - September 24, 1999 - January 2, 2000

Breaking Racial Barriers: African Americans in the Harmon Foundation Collection - January 31, 1996 - September 14, 1997

The Amistad Case - Spring 1999

Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen - January 29 1998 - April 18, 1999

Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy - July 26 - December 1, 1996

National Public Radio

National Register of Historic Places - "Nation's official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation...properties listed on the Register include districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture." You can search by name, location, agency and theme. A theme search for Underground Railroad Travel Itinerary retrieves 43 results and Civil Rights Travel Itinerary retrieves 42 results.

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) - Searchable via RLIN AMC File Advanced Search Form, an Easy Search Form (word list) and an Easy Search Form (left-anchored phrase). A search for slavery retrieves over 1500 records.

National Urban League - Offers a Audio & Video Archives and a Virtual Library which has archives of the To Be Equal columns. The Speeches Archive contains speech transcripts and includes a webcast of the talk given at the National Press Club by Hugh B. Price, President of the National Urban League, December 10, 1999.

NationsBank African-American Musical Heritage Collection - Collection of nearly 10,000 pieces of sheet music documenting the contributions of African-Americans to the nation's musical heritage at the University of South Florida Tampa Campus Library. Provides composer (names of individual who contributed), title, publisher & date. Browsable by title or names of individual who contributed.

Negro in the American Rebellion - Full-text of the the 1867 book by William Wells Brown from the Making of America Project.

Negro Periodicals in the United States - Annotated bibliography by Melvin R. Sylvester, B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library, C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University.

NetNoir Online: the Black Network - Includes a section for Black History Month.

New York Public Library

CATNYP - Library Catalog

NYPL Digital Gallery: Africana & Black History

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture - A division of the New York Public Library, the site includes a Gallery of Images and Sounds, Selected Internet Sources of Information on Africa and the African Diaspora, and African American Women Writers of the 19th Century a "collection of electronic texts...focusing on the writers who founded the African American women's literary tradition." Finding Aids provides descriptive summaries of the collections in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division and includes 300-500 word biographies of over 90 African Americans. The Schomburg Center Video Oral History Gallery has Selected Clips from the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project with comments by Nat Adderley, Doc Cheatham, Jon Faddis and 18 others. (Requires Quicktime plug-in.)

New York Times: Books - Provides access to the most recent New York Times Book Review, its back issues, reviews from the daily paper and a searchable archive of over 50,000 book reviews back to 1980. You can read First Chapters from selected books, browsable by author, in Fiction and Nonfiction. (Registration is required to access the site, but it's free.)

Newspapers in Virginia Database - A subject search for African Americans locates 10 pages of results with publishing information about African American newspapers throughout the country, not just in Virginia. (For example there are 25 records for New York.) Newspapers in Virginia, a Bibliography of American Newspapers Examined by the Virginia Newspaper Project is an alphabetical list grouped by state, county, and city.

North Star: A Journal of African-American Religious History

Notable Blacks of Cleveland - "Approximately 2000 images of 500 individuals selected from the photographs in the Cleveland Press Collection." There are, for example, photos of Norma Quarles, Elsa Ransom and Al Roker of WKYC-TV 3. Other notables include writers Chester Hines and Toni Morrison; Charles Harold Loeb, Managing editor, and William Otis Walker, editor and publisher, Call & Post newspaper; Athletes Harrison Dillard, DeHart Hubbard and Jesse Owens; civil rights activist Richard L. Gunn; jazz pianist Bill Gidney, entrepreneur Alonzo Wright; and Jean Murrell Capers, first Black woman elected to Cleveland City Council.

"Now What a Time": Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943 - Library of Congress Amerian Memory collection "consists of approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia." You can browse by performer, title and manuscript. Among the MP3 audio files:

Children, I'm Goin' Way - Silver Star Singers, 1943.

Death Come a-Knockin - Four Brothers, 1943.

I'll Fly Away - Lincoln Park Singers, 1943.

I Got My Ticket - Traveller Home Singers, 1941.

Fast Train - John Lee Thomas (harmonica), 1941.

One Nation News

- African American and African focused newspaper in Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota

Online Archive of California - Online archive of over 28,000 images illustrating California's history and culture consisting of photographs, pictures, and manuscripts from the collections of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. You can Browse the Collection. (Select "container listing" to access the images.) Collections with online content include:

Ralph J. Bunche Papers: Finding Aid

Brian Urquhart Collection of Material about Ralph Bunche: Finding Aid

Los Angeles Urban League Records, 1933-1945: Finding Aid

W. S. Savage Collection

Arthur B. Spingarn Collection of Negro Literature Ephemera: Finding Aid

Slave Documents Collection

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Region 1 Photograph Collection, ca. 1940-1982: Finding Aid

African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1963-1974

Online Books Page - John Mark Ockerbloom's index or directory to full-texts on the Web includes links to more than 20,000 English works in various formats. It allows you to search or browse by author, title, subject and serial. There's a page of new listings. Authors include Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and W. E. B. Du Bois.

OurDocuments.gov - Among the Milestone Documents are Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), Emancipation Proclamation (1863), War Department General Order 143: Creation of the U.S. Colored Troops (1863), 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) and the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870)

Our Shared History: Celebrating African American History and Culture - National Park Service site is a rich resource for African American history. It provides information on African-American historic sites, the Underground Railroad, the Golden Crescent, the Georgia Florida Coast, Historic Baltimore, Boston and Detroit.

Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party - Chronology of the Black Panther Party is accompanied by transcripts as well as video and sound clips from KPFA Radio's and the Pacifica Radio Archives. You can hear Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver and Kathleen Cleaver and many others activists.

Papers of African American Artists - Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Text Archives - Provides access to over two hundred poems including four audio versions. With Poetry Title Index. (Wright State University).

Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration - Columbia College, Chicago. For additional Internet resources on Robeson see Howard University's Paul Robeson Centennial: Selected Web Sites.

Pearl Primus Collection, 1920-1994 - "Pearl Primus (1919-1994) was an African-American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and teacher." Held by the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library

Performing Arts Encyclopedia: A guide to the performing arts collections and exhibitions at the Library of Congress - "Guide to the collections and resources at the Library of Congress that pertain to music, theater, and dance." Searchable by field or format, limit your search to online collections and browse by name, title and subject. Includes special presentations:

African-American Band Music & Recordings, 1883-1923

Library of Congress Concerts - In Gospel: a joyful sound. Shirley Caesar and ensemble you can hear You're next in line.

Patriotic Melodies - You can hear John Brown's Body sung by the J. Weldon Norris Chorale.

Historic Sheet Music Collection - Subjects include African Americans, Emancipation, jazz musicians, Apollo Theatre

Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz - Photographs from the William P. Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress, "comprising over sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists, documents the jazz scene from 1938 to 1948, primarily in New York City and Washington, D.C." Searchable and organized by Name, Subject or Venue.

Pop And Politics - Author and ABC reporter Farai Chideya's ideas and opinions on modern pop culture and politics.

Port Chicago Disaster: A Resource for Teachers and Students - 1944 explosion killed 320 men, including 202 African American enlisted men. Doug Prouty, Educational Technology Specialist, Contra Costa County Office of Education.

The Preacher's Cadence - John Schaefer talks with poet and musician Carl Hancock Rux about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his gospel cadence. Soundcheck, WCNY, Monday, January 17, 2005. [Audiofile]

Prelinger Archives - Internet Archive.

Study of Negro Artists

Palmour Street (1957)

With No One to Help Us (1967

Teddy (1971)

Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration - With selected full-text articles. The Summer 1997 Special Issue: Federal Records and African American History has 16 articles on the use of federal records in African American historical research.

Psychedelic 60s: the Civil Rights Movement - Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

Quarterly Black Review of Books

Project Gutenberg Home Page - Michael Hart's huge undertaking to digitize public domain texts provides access by author and by title. Authors of interest include Brown, William Wells, 1815-1884, Douglass, Frederick, 1817?-1895,Du Bois, W. E. B. [William Edward Burghardt], 1868-1963 and Wheatley, Phillis, 1753-1784. Also available is Norman Coombs' Black Experience in America, originally published by Twayne, c 1972.

RaceSci History of Race in Science - Sponsored by the History Department, University of Toronto and described as a "resource for scholars and students interested in the history of "race" in science, medicine, and technology."

Radicalism Collection - Project of the Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections which provides access by subject or by title to full-text documents, including material on the Black Panthers and the Scottsboro Boys.

Ralph Waldo Emerson McGill Papers - As editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, McGill played a major role in the fight for civil rights in the South. With Table of Contents. Over 2,000 of his columns from 1950 to 1969 have been digitized (in Series IV Writings 1913-1969, Subseries 5. Book reviews and miscellaneous writings, Box 44, Folder 3-4) and are viewable online in pdf format. The collection is searchable. For example, a 1 January 1966 column, Maturity in Civil Rights (no. 02520100090200070330000) discusses the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). In Assists to 'Black Power' (no. 02520100090200072066000), 17 July 1967, McGill comments on a recent NEA report finding Alabama schools for Blacks "miserably inferior." (Selected Archives at Georgia Tech and Emory (SAGE).)

Remembering Harold - Over 100 photographs of former Mayor of Chicago Harold Washington (1983 - 1987) from Chicago Public Library Digital Collections.

Recent Acquisitions in African-American History & Literature - University of Virginia Library Exhibition, February 1996.

Recovered Histories - " Captures the narratives of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, clergy, planters and rebels. Use the themed narratives as starting points or "Search Collection" to explore over 40,000 pages in the collection." Anti-Slavery International, Thomas Clarkson House, London.

Remembering Black Loyalists, Black Communities in Nova Scotia - Nova Scotia Museum of Archaeology

Renascence Editions - Has the full-text of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Repositories of Primary Sources - Terry Abraham's listing of over 3700 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary ources for the research scholar.

Richmond's Other Heroes: Finding African-American history in the cradle of the Confederacy - American Heritage, September 1998.

Road From Frederick to Thurgood: Black Baltimore in Transition, 1870 - 1920 - Maryland State Archives. Provides a list of Related Sites and Resources.

Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project - Interviews "conducted by Kentucky native, author, and first poet laureate of the United States, Robert Penn Warren in 1964 as research for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, Random House, 1965)." There are transcripts of interviews with Malcolm X (June 2, 1964), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 18, 1964), Richard Gunn (May 7, 1964) and Rev. Milton Galamison (June 17, 1964). AKentucky Digital Library project.

Rosewood Reborn - One hour RealAudio radio documentary, narrated by James Earl Jones and produced by RealityWorks, recounts the Rosewood massacre of 1923, and the $2-million dollar survivor settlement of 1994.

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft - Project Gutenberg Etext

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection - 10,000 digitized "pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, newsletters of local and regional anti-slavery societies, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery" donated to Cornell University in 1870 by the American abolitionist Reverend Samuel J. May. A phrase search for Gerrit Smith, for example, retrieves many items.

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program - University of Florida. There are, for example, 22 interviews with "Black Elected Public Officials."

Interview with Mildred T. Grant - Asili Ya Nadhiri, February 20, 1983, Eatonville, Florida. Subject: Zora Neale Hurston

Interview with Arna Bontemps - Transcript of interview at Yale University on 18 November 1970. Subject: Zora Neale Hurston.

Interview with Franklin Williams - David Colburn and Steve Lawson, February 11, 1985. Subject: Groveland Case

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture - A division of the New York Public Library, the site includes a Gallery of Images and Sounds, Selected Internet Sources of Information on Africa and the African Diaspora, and African American Women Writers of the 19th Century a "collection of electronic texts...focusing on the writers who founded the African American women's literary tradition." Finding Aids provides descriptive summaries of the collections in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division and includes 300-500 word biographies of over 90 African Americans. You can also search the New York Public Library's catalog, CATNYP. The Schomburg Center Video Oral History Gallery has Selected Clips from the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project with comments by Nat Adderley, Doc Cheatham, Jon Faddis and 18 others. (Requires Quicktime plug-in.)

Scottsboro Boys - AFRO-American Newspapers.

Secession Era Editorials Project - Furman University Department of History project has collected newspaper editorials on four major secession-related events: Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854), Dred Scott Case (1857), John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry (Oct.-Dec. 1859), and the Caning of Sumner (May 1856), the attack on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks.

Seneca Village - African American village razed in 1850's to make way for Central Park. A joint project of the New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University.

Slavery and the Ratification of the Constitution - Model Editions Partnership. Primary source documents

Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 - More than 100 pamphlets and books published between 1772 and 1889 on the experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. "Highlights of the collection include the cases of Somerset v. Stewart, 1772, which laid the groundwork for the abolition of slavery in England, and Dred Scott, 1857, which helped precipitate the Civil War, as well as the memoirs of Daniel Drayton, who helped slaves escape to freedom. Other materials document the work of John Quincy Adams and William Lloyd Garrison to abolish slavery and the trial of John Brown. The collection contains courtroom transcripts, important speeches from trials, lawyers' trial arguments, and Supreme Court decisions. A special presentation shows a manuscript slave code of 1860 from the District of Columbia." (Danna C. Bell-Russel) Also included in the collection is information on The trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D., charged with publishing seditious libels, by circulating the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society, before the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, held at Washington, in April, 1836, occupying the court the period of ten days.

Small Towns, Black Lives: African American Communities in Southern New Jersey - Photographs and text by Wendel A. White.

Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) - Search:

art inventories

image gallery

Cross Catalog Searching Center - "Allows you to search descriptive records from dozens of Smithsonian libraries, archives and specialized research units. Search over 1.7 million records, with links to images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from all across the Smithsonian." A search for civil rights, for example, retrieves over 2,000 records.

Smithsonian Institution Archives

Archives, Manuscripts, Photographs Catalog

library catalog

Art Exhibition Catalog Index.

Smithsonian Magazine - Has Archives of Past Issues

Celebrating Resistance - Bu Lucinda Moore, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2008.

Rasta Revealed - By Jess Blumberg Smithsonian Magazine, January 2008.

SNCC 1960-1966: Six Years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee - Hear John Lewis, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer & John Winters in RealAudio.

The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois (from the Bartleby Library.)

Southern Changes: The Journal of the Southern Regional Council, 1978-2003 - The Beck Center for Electronic Collections at Emory University and the Southern Regional Council have launched this on-line, searchable database of the Council's quarterly journal. "This digital archive contains full-length original articles, reviews, interviews, essays, and reports that explore the variety of social conditions and cultural issues affecting the South."

Southern Historical Collection - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With online finding aids for African American Resources.

Southern Oral History Program - University of North Carolina. You can Browse by Interviewer. Has a Finding Aid. Look for the interviews by James Eddie McCoy. (For more about McCoy see A Man Tapes His Town: The Unrelenting Oral Histories of Eddie McCoy, Lost & Found Sounds, National Public Radio, October 5, 2000. “A self-made historian, Eddie has done some 140 interviews since 1979, and knows just about every detail of the life and lore of Oxford: his neighbors, his friends, and total strangers. Eddie records the who, what, when, where, and why of slavery times, of sharecropping, of the civil rights era, of who poured the first concrete in Oxford.") Here are are few of his 160 interviews:

Interview with Serena Henderson Parker - April 13, 1995. With Document Menu. “Parker remembers her schoolhouse in Fairport, North Carolina. The school did not have electricity; instead, students used "lamplights." She remembers other aspects of her community's social life, including "box parties," when students and parents wrapped gifts to be bid on to add to the school's coffers, and school plays.”

Interview with Annie Bell Williams Cheatham - March 21, 1995. “Annie Bell Cheatham, an eighty-four-year-old black woman and a longtime resident of Oxford, North Carolina, talks about her childhood as the daughter of a sharecropper, the limited educational opportunities open to her, and the many, many stories of slavery that were passed down to her by older relatives. She gives short answers through much of the interview and her informal conversational style is reflective of her familiarity with her interviewer, James Eddie McCoy, a fellow Oxford resident. The most detailed parts of this interview have to do with the second- and third-hand slavery stories on which she was reared and how these served as life lessons for navigating North Carolina's racial geography.”

Interview with Louise Pointer Morton - December 12, 1994. “Louise Pointer Morton was born in Granville County, North Carolina, in 1910. Morton begins the interview by describing her grandmother's role in the founding of the Jonathon Creek Church (intermittently called the Johnson Creek Church in the interview). Although she does not recall the specific date of the church's construction, Morton explains that her grandmother acquired land for the church from the Pittard family, to whom she was enslaved and seems to have continued to work for following her emancipation. With the gift of land, Morton and other African Americans in the community built a log church. The church was eventually replaced and a school for local African American children was also built on the land. Morton's grandmother had purchased five acres by the church and the school, where she raised her nine children and where many of her grandchildren also lived. Morton describes growing up in this community, relating her school and church experience and life without electricity or running water. Despite the lack of luxuries, Morton recalls with fondness how the community gathered to socialize and to work together during corn shuckings, and she expresses pride in her family's self-sufficiency. Additionally, in her recollections of the Jonathon (Johnson) Creek Church, Morton throws into relief the centrality of religion as a preeminent social institution within southern African American communities.”

SpectraLinks Internet Guide to African Americans - Archives of F. Leon Wilson's mailing list announcing and describing new African-American related web sites.

Stamp on Black History Index - Black men and women who have been honored on U.S. postage stamps. With alphabetical list.

Still Going On: An Exhibit Celebrating the Life and Times of William Grant Still - Still was the first African American composer to have a symphony performed by an American orchestra; Duke University Special Collections Library.

Supreme Court Historical Society

Landmark Supreme Court Decisions

digitized publications including the Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook back to 1976.

The Supreme Court Bar's First Black Member - by Clarence G. Contee. "On February 1, 1865, Dr. John S. Rock, a lawyer and abolitionist, was admitted to practice law before the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States." In December 1855 Rock was "one of the sponsore of a dinner honoring William Nell Cooper, a black Bostonial abolitionist, who had started the litigation integrating the public schools of Boston in the famous case of Roberts V. City of Boston (5 Cushing, 198; Mass. 158 (1849)). 1976 Yearbook, pp. 62-65.

Significant Oral Arguments of the Supreme Court 1955-1993 - "In 1996, the Supreme Court Historical Society appointed an Ad Hoc Committee of distinguished legal scholars and Supreme Court practitioners to determine the most significant oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court from 1955 until 1993. The Committee was asked to pick not only important cases, but also examples of effective appellate advocacy. Ultimately the Committee selected 411 cases; 130 from the Warren Court era, 160 from the Burger Court Era and 121 from the first seven years of the Rehnquist Court." (Links to Findlaw) Civil rights cases include: 394 U.S. 147 (1969) Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham

Sylvia Davis v. United States - United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, September 21, 1999. Sylvia Davis, a Seminole Indian (who is also African-American) of Shawnee, Oklahoma, was denied government assistance funds by the tribe on the grounds that she did not possess a Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood for her son.

Tavis Smiley Show - National Public Radio African-American-oriented news program. See also Tavis Smiley and Archive. Includes interview with

Cornel West - January 7, 2002

Michael Eric Dyson - March 14, 2002

Halle Berry - March 07, 2002

Diane McWhorter - November 29, 2004

Kwame Anthony Appiah - March 1, 2006

Technology Versus African-Americans - Anthony Walton, Notes & Comment, Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.

Thomas Jefferson Papers - Has a A Bibliography of Sources in Special Collections Related to Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings and the Hemings Family of Monticello with digitized images.(Special Collections Department, University of Virginia.)

Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection - Searchable archive of 300 nineteenth and early twentieth century images of African Americans. There are 44 photographs depicting various aspects of the tobacco industry in Virgina. (Joint effort between Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries and the Valentine Museum/Richmond History Center.)

Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund - With links to Member Schools.

Time-Life Photo Sight - With portraits of Influential African Americans of the 20th Century.

Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement - Western Michigan University's Department of Political Science

To Be More Than Equal: the Many Lives of Martin R. Delany, 1812-1885 - Written and assembled by Jim Surkamp with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council and the George Washington Carver Institute. With Index of People.

Trailtones: The African-American Heritage of Arizona - Gloria L. Smith's work, in pdf format, is part of the University of Arizona Library's Southwest Electronic Text Center which also includes James Walter Yancy's The Negro of Tucson, Past and Present.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project - Unesco. Slave Voyages: The Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Americans is a 272 page document (in pdf format) by Hilary McDonald Beckles of the University of the West Indies.

Transatlantic Slavery: Selected Bibliography - Compiled by Shauna Collier, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History & Culture.

Tuskegee Airmen - National Historic site in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive - University of Virginia

Underground Railroad Years: Canada in an International Arena - An exhibition from Canada's Digital Collections. With index.

Unforgivable Blackness The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson - PBS documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns

United Negro College Fund

Universal Black Pages - Comprehensive listing of African-diaspora-related Web pages.

University of South Alabama Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center (SCC) - With links to other resources.

Urban Archives - Temple University. "Established in 1967 to document the social, economic, and physical development of the Philadelphia area from the mid-19th century to the present."

U.S. Census Bureau - Has links to the latest trend data for Minorities including African Americans.

U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights - Has a list of U.S. Accredited Postsecondary Minority Institutions

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration - The searchable database, ARC (Archival Research Catalog, "is the online catalog of NARA's nationwide holdings in the Washington, DC area, Regional Archives and Presidential Libraries." Black History provides links "to African-American culture, biographies and genealogical information, and other images of Blacks in American history." A section for teachers, Digital Classroom, includes Beyond the Playing Field: Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Advocate, The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War and The Amistad Case. (See also OurDocuments.gov).

U.S. Senate Oral History Program: Jesse R. Nichols - Complete text of oral history interviews conducted in 1994 with the first African American hired as a clerical staff member of the Senate. Jesse Nichols served as government documents clerk and librarian for the Senate Finance Committee from 1937 to 1971. (Senate Oral History Program.)

Videotapes on African Americans - Prepared by Malia Watson and Linda Engelberg of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The videos are briefly annotated. (See also the Library at the University of California, Berkeley's African-American Studies: Videotape and Audiocassete.)

Virginia Hamilton - Official site of prize-winning author of children's books.

Voice of the Shuttle - Afro-American Literature - Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Voices From the Gaps: Women Writers of Color - University of Minnesota site provides links to African-American writers

Voices From the Smithsonian Associates - "Online streaming programs featuring lectures and discussions by world renowned scholars, performers and authors." African-American-related programs include Vernon Jordan: The Life and Times of Vernon Jordan recorded November 19, 2001; Walter Mosley: Black Male Heroes recorded December 5, 1994; Derrick Bell: The Art and Dynamics of Protest recorded March 29, 1995; and Johnnetta B. Cole: Family is More than Biology recorded December 8, 1999.

Voices of Civil Rights - Joint project of the AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress "to collect and preserve personal accounts of America's struggle to fulfill the promise of equality for all."

WGBH Forum Network - "Audio and video streaming Website dedicated to curating and serving live and on-demand lectures given by some of the world's foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers and community leaders." are over 100 archived lectures related to African and African American Culture including the followng:

African Americans and the American Dream - Vincent Harding, Cambridge Forum, October 1, 2008.

The Hemingses of Monticello

- Annette Gordon-Reed, Georgia Center for the Book, September 29, 2008.

Two Tuskegee Airmen Remember - Lee Archer and Hiram Mann, Public Broadcasting Atlanta, September 23, 2008.

The House at Sugar Beach - Helene Cooper, Georgia Center for the Book, September 15, 2008.

Chasing the Crescent Moon: Sickle Cell Disease - Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, July 26, 2008.

Researching Civil Rights: Challenges Met and Yet to Come - Gary Orfield and Theodore Shaw, Harvard University, May 11, 2007.

Education for Liberation: Black Panther Party - Elaine Brown, Public Broadcasting Atlanta, April 6, 2007.

Civil Rights and Human Rights - Julian Bond, chairman, NAACP. Lecture given at Wellesley College, October 19, 2006.

Looking For Mr. Gilbert: African-American Photographer - John Hanson Mitchell, March 30, 2005.

Elizabeth Alexander: The Black Interior - First Parish Church, Cambridge, April 21, 2004.

Black Writers: Andrea Lee and Jamaica Kincaid - Harvard University, February 5, 2003.

Black Writers: Darryl Pinckney and Patricia Powell - Harvard University, March 19, 2003.

Black Writers: Elizabeth Alexander and Suzan-Lori Parks - Harvard University, March 12, 2003.

Black Writers: Rita Dove and John Wideman - Harvard University, March 5, 2003.

Meet the Poet: Nikki Giovanni - February 4, 2003

Boston's 19th Century African American Communities - Museum of Afro-American History, January 25, 2003.

Bayard Rustin: Live Speech on the Freedom Budget - December 11, 1967.

Web of Life: the Art of John Biggers - "Concentrates on the life and work of the African American artist and art educator John Biggers. It features information about Biggers, teaching materials, activities for students, a conversation with the artist, examples of his work, a list of resources, and an opportunity to talk to the artist and project coordinator via e-mail." (ArtsEdNet, a division of the Getty Education Institute for the Arts.)

W.E.B Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research - Harvard University research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture, and social institutions of African Americans. Has a News Archive.

William Neal Brown (1919-) - Rutgers University Faculty Emeritus

Interview with William Neal Brown - Rutgers Oral History Archives, February 25, 2005. Interviewed by Allison Mueller, Fernando Palma and Shaun Illingworth in Millburn, New Jersey. Includes photo gallery.

The Great Debaters - By Paul Hond, Columbia Magazine, Winter 2007-2008. Account of the debate of William Neal Brown and Malcolm X at the Rutgers School of Pharmacy in Newark, New Jersey on November 3, 1961. Includes "first-ever published" excerpts from the debate's opening remarks.

Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity - Smithsonian Institution.

Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875 - Collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography which attempts to include every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875. Project of the Indiana University Digital Library Program. There are currently 2,887 volumes included (2,109 unedited, 778 fully edited and encoded) by 1,394 authors. You can search the full-text. Wright "listed a total of 2,923 titles in adult fiction, including "novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, tract-like tales, allegories, and fictitious biographies and travels, in prose" (from the introduction), and inventoried 18 American libraries for holdings. This compilation is part of his three-volume set listing American fiction from 1774 through 1900, and is still considered the most comprehensive bibliography of American adult fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries." There are a number of anti-slavery (and pro-slavery) titles including:

Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857) - by Martha Griffith Browne

Autographs for Freedom (1853) - by William G. Allen

Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States (1867) - by William Wells Brown

Ellen, or, The Chained Mother and Pictures of Kentucky Slavery. Drawn from Real Life. (1855) - by Mary B. Harlan

Hatchie, the Guardian Slave, or, The Heiress of Bellevue (1853) By Oliver Optic.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) - Written by herself. [Harriet Brent Jacobs]. Edited by L. Maria Child.

John and Mary, or, the Fugitive Slaves: a tale of South-Eastern Pennsylvania (1873)

The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: being the personal recollections of Peter Still and his wife "Vina," after forty years of slavery... (1856) - by Kate E. R.Pickard

The Martyrs and the Fugitive, or, A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Death of an African Family, and the Slavery and Escape of Their Son (1859) by Rev. S. H. Platt

The Planter's Victim; or, Incidents of American Slavery (1855) by Samuel M. Smucker (1823-1863). Dedicated to Hon. William H. Seward.

Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a slave and as a freeman: a narrative of real life (1859) - "Partly fictitious."

Slavery in the United States. A narrative of the life and adventures of Charles Ball, a black man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia as a Slave (1854)

The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (1852) by Richard Hildreth

The following Wright numbers (search by idno) may also be relevant: