Ethnic Studies: African Americans

Material for the study of African American history and culture. Examines colonization, abolition, migration and the WPA (Works Progress Administration).

This collection focuses on those members of the Central Coast community who are of African-American heritage. The photos in the exhibit were collected by the members of the Black Gold Cooperative Library System Advisory Board. The African-American citizens in the various jurisdictions in the Black Gold region selected the photos each wanted to contribute to the exhibit.

Examines "America's journey through slavery" with historical documents. Primary source material is linked under "Resource Bank" in each of the four parts.

Seventeen collections of African American historical documents from the Library of Congress, including: African American Sheet Music; Baseball and Jackie Robinson; Frederick Douglass Papers; Zora Neale Hurston Plays; Slave Narratives; Slaves and the Courts; The Church in the Southern Black Community; and others. Time spans range from 1600 through the 20th century.

A selection of 100 oral history interviews, with transcripts, chronicling African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s. Interviews are browsable by state, interviewee name, gender and occupation.

A curated selection of primary sources designed for teaching and learning about the struggles and triumphs of Black Americans. Developed with input from Black history scholars and advisors.

Includes documents and photographs detailing the events surrounding the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Includes images, texts, and sound/video clips.

A large selection of items that document Freedom Summer, a nonviolent effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system during 1964.

Presents official records of the Commission from 1957 to the present.

A selection of images of 19th-century African Americans. The site is searchable, and collections may be browsed by topic (e.g. civil war, family, politics, religion, slavery).

Presents images, texts and maps that explore "thirteen defining migrations that formed and transformed African America" from 1450 to the present.

The King Institute presents primary and secondary source material from and about MLK. Includes speeches, sermons and photographs. Also has the full audio recording of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

"Books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920."

This collection documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.

A digital collection of books and pamphlets that demonstrate the varying ideas and beliefs about slavery in the United States as expressed by Americans throughout the nineteenth century.

An image collection, with most dating from the period of slavery, that depicts the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

More than 100 pamphlets and books (1772-1889) from the Library of Congress on the experiences of African and African-American slaves in the colonies and the US: an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, etc.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Find the names of the ships that transported the slaves, list of African names of the slaves transported in the ships, statistics of how many slaves were transported, etc.

Aggregates collections of primary source material - from more than 1,000 libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations - that document African American history and culture.

Includes text of the novel; responses to the novel by the press, African Americans and slavery proponents; and topically-related texts that predate publication of the novel.

Interviews of 23 individuals born into slavery between 1823 and the early 1960s, recorded between 1932 and 1975. Includes transcripts and streaming audio of the recordings.

Digital archive of materials related to the book of the same name, published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. Warren traveled throughout the United States in early 1964 and spoke with those involved in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The archive consists of sound recordings of each interviewee, as well as print materials related to the project.