Inclusive Collections

This collection comprises of the voluminous working files of John P. Davis and successive executive secretaries of the National Negro Congress. Beginning with papers from 1933 that predate the formation of the National Negro Congress, the wide-ranging collection documents Davis's involvement in the Negro Industrial League and includes the "Report Files" of Davis's interest and work on the "Negro problem."

Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

The African American Historical Serials Collection features 173 periodicals spanning from 1816 through 1922. The periodicals in this collection include newspapers and magazines, in addition to reports and annuals from various African American organizations, including churches and educational and service institutions.

Contains 50,000 pages of text and 17,000 pages of liner notes that offers the first comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.

This enormous collection of African American newspapers contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day, including the Mexican War, Presidential and Congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion.

African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, provides online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. This unique collection, which includes historically significant papers from more than 35 states, features many rare 19th-century titles.

The early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American to the major poets of the nineteenth century.

African Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest offers more than 1,000 fully searchable printed works critical for insight into African-American culture and life from the beginning of Jim Crow to World War I and beyond.

African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle provides nearly 1,400 fully searchable printed works essential for understanding the African-American struggle for identity from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of Jim Crow.

Now part of American Song and also included with more classical, jazz and world music in Music Online.
Jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk songs, and narratives with many field recordings.

Primary source documents and archives for American history and culture: printed texts, collections of photographs, and some scanned manuscripts on topics such as African-American pamphlets, Civil War photographs, women's suffrage, etc.

Records and preserves the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South from the 1890s to the 1950s. The largest single collection of Jim Crow-era oral histories in the world: visitors to the site can listen to over 175 hours of recordings. Contains over 10,000 pages of transcripts from the interviews, which "capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making" that made up the African American experience in the South during this period.

This primary source collection details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves.

Primary source documents from the National Negro Business League, a business organization founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington. The League included small African American business owners, doctors, farmers, craftsmen, and other professionals. Its goal was to allow business to put economic development at the forefront of getting African-American equality in America.

A curated selection of primary sources is designed for teaching and learning about the struggles and triumphs of Black Americans. Developed with input from Black history scholars and advisors, its easily discoverable materials are ideal for assignments and special projects focused on U.S. Black history. Covers several time periods in American history when the river of the Black Freedom Struggle ran more powerfully- while not losing sight of the fierce, often violent opposition that Black people have faced on the road to freedom.

The Black Liberation Army was an underground, black nationalist-Marxist militant organization that operated from 1970 to 1981. Composed largely of former Black Panthers, the organization's program was one of "armed struggle" and its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States."

This primary source collection offers an expansive window into centuries of African American history, culture and daily life—as well as the ways the dominant culture has portrayed and perceived people of African descent. The content in this database is sourced from more than 19,000 American and global news sources, including over 400 current and historical Black publications.

This collection provides a wealth of material from Ahmad's personal archive--letters, speeches, financial records, and more--augmented with FBI files and other primary sources. The collection sheds light on 1960s radicalism, politics, and culture, and provides an ideal foundation for coursework in African-American studies, radical studies, post-Colonial studies.

The content featured in this collection explores linkages between women’s suffrage and other social causes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (anti-slavery, anti-lynching, education reform, and civil rights) as well as racism within the Suffrage Movement.

Part of Gale Primary Sources: Archives Unbound, materials in the collection document John LeFlore's prolific work in both public and private life.

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a digital humanities interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life. The site features hundreds of primary sources from the conventions movement.

Video, audio, and text of interviews with leaders in the black community, conducted chiefly by Julian Bond. These oral histories focus on leadership and the transformational role of the civil rights movement in Americ

Fannie Lou Hamer was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The collection includes correspondence, financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items.

Search over 56,000 pages of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) involvement in notable civil rights and civil liberties issues such as Willie McGee, the Trenton Six, Martinsville Seven and many others. CRC also held many high profile protests in Washington DC and the UN. Due to its Communist Party affiliations, the Civil Rights Congress was cited as subversive by President Harry S. Truman’s Attorney General, Thomas Clark.

This series contains a collection of essential materials for the study of the early development of the Civil Rights Movement-concerned with the issues of Lynching, Segregation, Race riots, and Employment discrimination. This collection from FDR’s Official File provides insight into his political style and presents an instructive example of how he balanced moral preference with political realities.

This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.

Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records, Supplement
This module supplements the original module of Federal Government records by adding civil rights records from the Ford and Reagan presidencies.

Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 1. Brings a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle. The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2. This Black Freedom module is highlighted by the records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett, and the Robert F. Williams Papers. SNCC, formed by student activists in 1960 after the explosion of the sit-in movement, was one of the three most important civil rights organizations of the 1960s, alongside SCLC and the NAACP.

Features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses from 1775-1867. Petitions were collected by Loren Schweninger over 4 year period from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Documents the realities of slavery at the most immediate local level with amazing candor. Also includes the important State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865.

Part of Gale Primary Sources: Archives Unbound, this collection consists of selected portions of the records of attorney Vernon Z. Crawford (1919–1986) and the Blacksher, Menefee and Stein law firm whose work represents a significant contribution to the shape of the civil rights movement in 20th century Alabama.

Composed of FBI surveillance files on the activities of the African Liberation Support Committee and All African People's Revolutionary Party; this collection provides two unique views on African American support for liberation struggles in Africa, the issue of Pan-Africanism, and the role of African independence movements as political leverage for domestic Black struggles.

The collection consists of rare works of poetry, organizational records, print publications, over one hundred articles, poems, plays, and speeches by Baraka, a small amount of personal correspondence, and oral histories. The collection has been arranged into eighteen series.

Digital collection of the NAACP’s archive of internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the U.S. It covers the organization’s involvement in crucial civil rights issues such as lynching, school desegregation, and discrimination in the military, the criminal justice system, employment, housing, etc.

The oldest continuously published black newspaper, is dedicated to the needs and concerns of the fourth largest black community in the U.S. During the 1930s the paper supported the growth of the United Way, rallied against the riots in Chester, PA, and continuously fought against segregation. Coverage is from 1912-2001.

Sourced from the records of the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, housed at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans. Provides access to a wealth of documents highlighting different responses to the challenges of overcoming prejudice, segregation and racial tensions. Ranges from survey material including interviews and statistics, to educational pamphlets, administrative correspondence, photographs and speeches from the Annual Race Relations Institutes.

This collection is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.

This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective, and the continued existence of slavery today.

Preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. Includes more than 700,000 digital images, drawn close to 2,000 unique volumes, dating from the 16th through 20th centuries that document the lives of an estimated 4 to 6 million individuals. Contains the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and also includes valuable information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.

This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action.

The SNCC Digital Gateway portrays how SNCC, alongside thousands of local Black residents, worked for Black people to take control of their political and economic lives. It unveils the inner workings of SNCC as an organization, examining how it coordinated sit-ins and freedom schools, voter registration and economic cooperatives, anti-draft protests and international solidarity struggles.

Consists of two major components: records of ante-bellum southern plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, and plantation records from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The primary source documents cover business and day-to-day labor operations, as well as the roles of women, racial attitudes, slave-master relations, and social and cultural life on the plantations.

Plantation records include documents on sales of enslaved people, runaways, discipline, diet, health, and the work loads of adults and children; plantation management; and westward migration prior to the Civil War. The commodities produced by enslaved labor--rice, cotton, sugar, tobacco, hemp, and others--accounted for more than half of the nation's exports. Part Two features holdings from the University of Virginia.

Part of the African American Studies Collection, this database includes records of the New York State Supreme Court, which include a full testimony of all witnesses, including the two who spoke in secrecy to hide their identities; preliminary motions, summations, the court's charge, the verdicts, and the sentences; and a confession made years after the trial by one of the men convicted.

The Library of Virginia houses local court records, state records, personal papers, business records, newspapers, special collections, books, journals, etc., that date back to the 1600's. Collectively, these records contain the names of millions of African Americans both enslaved and free. These names are access points to the individual stories of African Americans who lived in Virginia from the establishment of slavery in the 1600s until its demise in 1865. Telling stories that have not been told in full.

Primary source documents related to the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia. Boynton had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines.