Guide to Online Primary Sources: African Americans

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

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.

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

Examines "America's journey through slavery" with historical documents.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

Includes books, pamphlets and broadsides spanning from the early 16th to the early 20th century. Subjects covered include the West's discovery and exploitation of Africa; the rise of slavery in the New World along with the growth and success of abolitionist movements; the development of racial thought, including political protest and resistance to racism; descriptions of African American life throughout the Americans; and slavery and race in fiction and drama.

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.

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.

Black Drama contains 908 plays by 171 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.When complete, the collection will include more than 1,200 plays.

Primary sources focused on "six different phases of Black Freedom." Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860); The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877); Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932); The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945); The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975); and The Contemporary Era (1976-2000).

Comprehensive collection of stories from Africa and the African Diaspora, offering short stories and folktales, ranging thematically from oral traditions that date back many hundreds of years to contemporary tales of modern life. Also includes complete runs of selected literary magazines.

Thirteen volumes (plus an index) of Washington's papers. Volume 1 contains the autobiographical works.

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

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).

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.

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.

This collection from the Library of Congress includes oral histories, maps, photographs, newspapers, and newsreels pertaining to the migration of African Americans from rural to urban centers and from southeastern states to the north and west from the 1910s to 1970.

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.

Digital primary sources drawn mostly from U.S. archival collections. Collections are arranged into subject modules: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle; Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War; American Indians and the American West; American Politics & Society; International Relations & Military Conflicts; Revolutionary War & Early America; Women's Studies; Workers, Labor Unions, & Radical Politics.

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."

More than 7,500 articles from Oxford's reference works, plus primary sources with commentaries, over 1,000 images, maps, charts and tables, timelines and over 6,000 biographies.

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.

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.

Aggregates collections of primary source material - from 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. All of the print materials appear on the website in two versions: an image of the original document which is not searchable and a re-transcribed document which is searchable.