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
Academy of American Poets - African American poets include:
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.
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 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 - Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the Library houses over 300,000 volumes and bound periodicals, eight million manuscripts, 100,000 images, and thousands of hours of audio tape. See Resources in African American History. Other items of interest include the Isaac Jackson Letterbooks, 1839-1843. "Isaac Jackson managed several estates in northern Jamaica during the years of transition from slavery to free labor."
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.
Anniina's Alice Walker Page - Anniina Jokinen who has also produced a Toni Morrison Page.
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" including
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
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 frin the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
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 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 which the Declaration of Independence assumed to be the birthright of every man, and which, according to the law of love, was our duty towards a suffering brother." (p. 118)
(From Documenting the American South.)
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.
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.
Black Film Center/Archive - Indiana University.
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
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.
California Heritage Digital Image Access Project - 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.) For example, African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1963-1974 has 140 digitized images. Other collections:
George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection, 1916-1977
African American History Collection
Herbert Aptheker Papers, 1842-1999
Ralph J. Bunche Papers
Brian Urquhart Collection of Material about Ralph Bunche
Los Angeles Urban League Records, KZSU (Radio station : Stanford) Project South
W. S. Savage Collection
Arthur B. Spingarn Collection of Negro Literature Ephemera
Slave Documents Collection
NAACP, Region I, Records
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.
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. There is a Civil Rights Timeline
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 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
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.
Alphabetical Listing
Famous Persons
Reading Room Index
Black Panther Party
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mississippi Burning
Jackie Robinson
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Elijah Muhammad
W.E.B. DuBois
Malcolm X
Josephine Baker
Stokeley Carmichael
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
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"
Benjamin Drew
Nat Turner
Frederick Douglass
Henry Carey
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.
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."
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 (RealAudio) 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
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."
Reviewed (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 - "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.
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."
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:
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."
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)."
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.
My Bondage and My Freedom. - Full-text of the 1857 book by Frederick Douglass from the Making of America Project
NAACP Online
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
"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
Death Come a-Knockin - Four Brothers
I'll Fly Away - Lincoln Park Singers
I Got My Ticket
Fast Train -by John Lee Thomas (harmonica)
One Nation News - African American and African focused newspaper in Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota
Online Archive of California - Part of the California Digital Library. There is a search page. (Much of the material is available to California residents only.)
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.
Online Resources: History of Slavery - Library Journal Digital's September WebWatch.
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.
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]