Library Resources: Primary Sources: African Americans

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

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

Primary documents that tell the story of ethnic groups along the Columbia River Basin (encompassing areas of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah and and British Columbia).

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.

A digital collection of 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.

Examines "America's journey through slavery" with historical documents.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Seventeen collections of African American historical documents from the Library of Congress, including: African American Sheet Music; Baseball and Jackie Robinson; Frederick Douglass Papers; Zora Neale Hurston Plays; Slave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.

This guide compiles links to digital materials related to Booker T. Washington that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Booker T. Washington

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

Searchable databases include the Mississippi Digital Library, oral history transcripts, and manuscripts and photographs.

Includes images, texts, and sound/video clips.

Online articles, digital exhibitions, photographs, audio and video streams, historical projects, and external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora. From the NYPL Schomburg Center.

Scanned documents relating to the 1920 lynchings in Minnesota.

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.

Primarily a collection of advertisements, published in Virginia during the 18th- and 19th century, for runaway and captured slaves and servants. Additional related material included.

Online document collection with over 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles.

The Hiphop Archive focuses on the knowledge, art, culture, materials, organizations, movements and institutions developed by those who support and follow Hiphop. Located at W.E.B. Dubois Institute for Afro-American Research.

Provides a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google. Browse by title, time period, or geographic area.

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

Presents scanned images of letters, court documents and other pieces related to the 1962 integration of the University of Mississippi.

Compilation of documents, sound recordings, and visual images. Includes filmed interview of Stokely Carmichael in Montgomery; 450 photographs created by the Subversive Unit of the Investigative and Identification Division of the Alabama Department of Public Safety in the course of sit-ins, demonstrations, and marches in several Alabama cities during the early to mid-1960s; and surveillance tapes preserving speeches made at an anniversary of the Montgomery Improvements Association in 1963.

Volumes on the life and work of Marcus Garvey throughout the history of his Pan Africanist movement.

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.

May's pamphlets and leaflets document the abolitionist movement at the local, regional, and national levels. Includes sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes.

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.