African American History Digital Library

Directory of Online Publications, Documents, Museum Exhibits, & Research Collections.
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See also Leaders and Historic Men and Women ; Slavery

19th Century Documents Project
"When completed this collection will include accurate transcriptions of many important and representative primary texts from nineteenth century American history, with special emphasis on those sources that shed light on sectional conflict and transformations in regional identity."
- Furman University

African American Odyssey
"...showcases the Library's incomparable African American collections. The preview is not only a highlight of what is on view in this major black history exhibition, but also a glimpse into the Library's vast African American collectionBoth include a wide array of important and rare books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings."
- American Memory, Library of Congress

African American Perspectives
Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
"The Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love."
- American Memory, Library of Congress

African Americans and National Identities in Central America (English and Spanish)
NEH Collaborative Research- "A Color for the Cosmic Race"
"An interdisciplinary, multinational research program to reconceptualize and document, both visually and textually, the history of people of African descent in Central America."
By Rina C·ceres, Mauricio MelÈndez, and Lowell Gudmundson supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program, Mount Holyoke College, and the Center for Central American Historical Research at the Universidad de Costa Rica.

[AIDS]Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Diagnoses of HIV/AIDS -- 33 States, 2001-2005
"During 2001--2004, blacks* accounted for 51% of newly diagnosed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) infections in the United States."
CDC - MMWR Weekly Report, March 9, 2007

Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency
"This electronic exhibit focuses on the depictions of slaves in Confederate currency. It is important to remember that these images were created by those who institutionalized and worked to preserve slavery, and they do not necessarily portray the slaves as they viewed themselves and their condition...Images of slavery, however, were not the only illustrations on such documents: Vignettes featuring modes of transportation, mythical characters, historical figures of the American Revolution, and romantic portrayals of white women and children also decorated paper money issued in the Confederacy. These scenes offer a new perspective on the Civil War era South."
A Project of the United States Civil War Center, Louisiana State University

Booker T. Washington Papers Online
"...is a completely free and searchable web site designed to provide researchers worldwide with full access to the thousands of pages comprising this 14-volume printed work, originally published by the University of Illinois Press.
The History Cooperative

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
"...contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress and includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division that are now made available to the public for the first time."
- American Memory, Library of Congress

Brown v. Board of Education - See our separate Brown v. Board of Education page.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
"The 'Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive' project will result in the creation of an Internet-accessible, fully searchable database of digitized versions of rare and unique library and archival resources on race relations in Mississippi...For the first phase of the project, USM Libraries is cooperating with the USM Center for Oral History to offer 125 oral history transcripts on the civil rights movement, such as those by civil rights leaders Charles Cobb, Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, and Hollis Watkins. This collection also includes oral histories of race-baiting governor Ross Barnett, national White Citizens Council leader William J. Simmons, and State Sovereignty head Erle Johnston."
McCain Library & Archives, University of Southern Mississippi

The Dred Scott Case
"Arguments about slavery in the print and in public debate had a direct impact on the Scotts and the people who surrounded them. The records contained in this exhibit document the Scotts' early struggle to gain their freedom through litigation and are the only extant record of this significant case as it was heard in the St. Louis Circuit Court ... The 85 documents in the Dred Scott collection are presented here as arranged by the Missouri State Archives..."
Washington University Libraries, St. Louis

Documenting the American South
A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.
"...an electronic collection sponsored by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research...Currently, DAS includes five digitization projects: slave narratives, first-person narratives, Southern literature, Confederate imprints, and materials related to the church in the black community."

Freedom's Journal
The first African-American owned and operated newspaper in the U.S., published 1827-1829 from New York City.
"...provided international, national, and regional information on current events and contained editorials declaiming slavery, lynching, and other injustices. The Journal also published biographies of prominent African-Americans and listings of births, deaths, and marriages in the African-American New York community. Freedom's Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada...All 103 issues of the Freedom's Journal have been digitized and placed into Adobe Acrobat format"
The State Historical Society of Wisconsin

HUArchivesNet (ejournal)
"...creates new ways to access one of the finest repositories of African and African American resources..."
Published quarterly by the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

[Katrina] The Chronicle of Higher Education

The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History
"...published exclusively on the world wide web with two primary goals. † First, in association with the Afro-American Religious History group of the American Academy of Religion, it will provide information on events, new publications, research collections, and other resources in the field of African-American religious history.†† Second,† we will present peer-reviewed articles based on historical research that explore the religious cultures of people of African descent in the United States. While our interest is primarily in North America, we will on occasion publish work from other disciplines and/or that deals in a comparative way with other areas of the African diaspora, as well as with regions in Africa.† "

Pew Internet & American Life Project
"The Project creates original research that explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, health care, schools, the work place, and civic/political life. The Pew Internet & American Life Project aims to be an authoritative source for timely information on the Internetís growth and societal impact, through research that is scrupulously impartial."

Remembering Jim Crow
By Stephen Smith, Kate Ellis, and Sasha Asianian
"For much of the 20th Century, African Americans in the South were barred from the voting booth, sent to the back of the bus, and walled off from many of the rights they deserved as American citizens. Until well into the 1960s, segregation was legal. The system was called Jim Crow. In this documentary, Americansóblack and whiteóremember life in the Jim Crow times."
Presented by American RadioWorks, November 2001.

Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
"This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica."
- Data and Program Library Service (DPLS), University of Wisconsin

Social Activism Sound Recording Project - The Black Panther Party
Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley - Media Resource Center
A Black Panther chronology with bibliography and selected links to online resources.

Tulsa Race Riot - 1921

Womanist Theory and Research On-Line
"...a biannual, peer-edited, interdisciplinary, intercultural, international journal on women of color."

Virginia Runaways Project
"The Virginia Runaways Project is a digital database of runaway and captured slave advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers. When a slave ran away, slave owners often placed remarkably detailed advertisements for their return. Sheriffs and other county officials also often advertised the capture of runaways or suspected runaways. This project offers full transcripts and images of all runaway and captured ads placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790."
By Thomas Costa, History Department, University of Virginia's College at Wise

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