LibGuides: Black History Month: On the Web

Richardson Library Resources

The library subscribes to several resources relevant to the history and culture of African Americans. Discover great moment sand history and scenes of every day life, through these comprehensive resources.

The Library of Congress

provides access to historical materials online through its Digital Collections. Collections highlighted to the right focus on African American people history and culture.

For access to all online collections click on the link below:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/

The National Museum of African American History and Culture

is one of the newest museums within the Smithsonian Institute. Its collections are quickly growing and many resources are discoverable online. Online collections are arrange topically in the column to the lower-right.

To explore more online resources through the NMAAHC click below:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/

Smithsonian Learning Labs

provides access to most online resources through the Smithsonian Institute. Find more resources for African American History and Culture HERE.

Explore the entire Smithsonian Learning Labs at this link:

https://learninglab.si.edu/

Richardson Library Resources

African American Biographical Database

Biographies of over 30,000 African-American activists, politicians, artists, writers, musicians, professionals, religious leaders, former slaves, and more, in over 40,000 entries from Black Biographical Dictionaries 1790-1950.

American Mosaic : The African American Experience

The American Mosaic: The African American Experience is an authoritative research tool for African American history and culture, providing information from contributors who are experts in the field. Contains primary documents, including slave narratives, speeches, court cases, quotations, advertisements, statistics, and other documentation, provides thesis-driven, peer-reviewed scholarly essays within the exclusive Idea Exchange sections, provides material directly tied to associated primary source documents, contains images, and other classroom resources.

Black Abolitionist Papers

A collection of primary sources documenting the work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Approximately 15,000 articles, documents, correspondence, proceedings, manuscripts, and literary works of almost 300 Black abolitionists around the world, from 1830-1865.

Historical Baltimore Afro-American Newspapers

The Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) offers full page and article images with searchable full text. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

History Makers Digital Archive

Provides video content, fully searchable transcripts and unique content for African American individuals from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences.

International Index to Black Periodicals

Includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from over 150 scholarly and popular journals, newspapers and newsletters from the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean - and full-text coverage of 40 core Black Studies periodicals (1998 forward).

Slavery and anti-Slavery in the Americas

Slavery and Anti-Slavery is a four-part collection devoted to the transatlantic history of slavery. It includes books, manuscripts, court records, and serials. Part 1, Debates over Slavery and Abolition, documents the debates surrounding slavery and its abolition in the U.S. but also in the UK and other European countries, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Parts 2, 3 and 4 address the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, the Institution of Slavery, and the Age of Emancipation. Morgan State University perpetually owns Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 and the complete collection includes over 5 million pages.

Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new window

A collection of legal materials on slavery including statutes in every colony and state in the United States and the English-speaking world.

Library of Congress Collections

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The online collection, containing approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865. Many of Douglass’s earlier writings were destroyed when his house in Rochester, New York, burned in 1872.

Rosa Parks Papers span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000. The collection, which contains approximately 7,500 items in the Manuscript Division, as well as 2,500 photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division, documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. The collection is a gift made to the Library in 2016 through the generosity of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The Library received the materials in late 2014, formally opened them to researchers in the Library’s reading rooms in February 2015, and now has digitized them for optimal access by the public.

Civil Rights History Project contains interviews of activists from a wide range of occupations, including lawyers, judges, doctors, farmers, journalists, professors, and musicians, among others. The video recordings of their recollections cover a wide range of topics within the freedom struggle, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 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 (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was 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. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

African-American Band Music & Recordings, 1883 to 1923 The core of this presentation consists of "stock" arrangements for bands or small orchestras of popular songs written by African Americans. In addition, we offer a smaller selection of historic sound recordings illustrating these songs and many others by the same composers (the arrangements might not necessarily be the same as those on the stocks). Educational materials include short biographies of composers and performers of the time and historical essays.

African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition (Exposition universelle internationale de 1900) The United States section of the Exposition featured an exhibit that, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, attempted to show "(a) The history of the American Negro. (b) His present condition. (c) His education. (d) His literature." Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway, who was named special agent for the Exposition, spearheaded the planning, collection and installation of the exhibit materials, which included 500 photographs, as well as 32 charts, numerous maps, and a display of 200 books written by African Americans.

African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Most were written by African-American authors, though some were written by others on topics of particular importance in African-American history. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, Emanuel Love, Lydia Maria Child, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington, among others.

Frederick Douglass Newspapers, 1847 to 1874 presents newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the African American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became one of the most famous orators, authors, and journalists of the 19th century. Douglass believed in the importance of the black press and in his leadership role within it, despite the struggles of earlier black newspaper enterprises.

Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress presents ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. Totaling 1,068 images, most of the scripts are housed in the Library's Manuscript Division with one each in the Music and in the Rare Book and Special Collections Divisions. There are four sketches and six full length plays in this group. Previously known mainly for her fiction and autobiography, Hurston here reveals her high ambitions as a dramatist.

William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection spans the years 1773 to 1987, with the bulk of the material dating from the Civil War period, 1861-1865. The collection consists of correspondence, pay vouchers, orders, muster rolls, enlistment and discharge papers, receipts, contracts, affidavits, tax records, miscellaneous military documents, and printed matter. Most items document African Americans in military service, especially the United States Corps d'Afrique and the United States Colored Troops, which were organized during the Civil War. Also included are many documents concerning slavery and various other Civil War documents that mention African Americans. The Revolutionary War items are primarily pay vouchers to Connecticut blacks who served in the Continental Army. World War I is represented by the papers of Lieutenant Edward L. Goodlett of the 370th Infantry, 93rd Division. Printed matter includes nineteenth-century speeches and writings on slavery, government orders, broadsides, and twentieth-century booklets and journal articles for scholars or collectors.

Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs provides almost 350 images showing African Americans and related military and social history. The Civil War era is the primary time period covered, with scattered examples through 1945. Most of the images are photographs, including 270 cartes de visite. (Subset of the above)

Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories contains recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-three interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.

Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip is an ethnographic field collection that includes nearly 700 sound recordings, as well as fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts documenting a three-month, 6,502-mile trip through the southern United States. Beginning in Port Aransas, Texas, on March 31, 1939, and ending at the Library of Congress on June 14, 1939, John Avery Lomax, Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the American Folklife Center archive), and his wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, recorded approximately 25 hours of folk music from more than 300 performers. These recordings represent a broad spectrum of traditional musical styles, including ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs.

The Lomax Collection includes 400 snapshot photographs made in the course of sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and ca. 1950 for the Archive of American Folk-Song. The photographs, which were transferred to the Prints and Photographs Division from the Archive of American Folk-Song in 1950, depict African American, Mexican American, and white musicians, singers and dancers, primarily in the southern United States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) and the Bahamas (Nassau, Andros Island, and Cat Island). In addition to posed portraits, the images show musicians performing in various settings: at home, in concert, and while performing prison labor outdoors. Views of children engaged in singing games, scenes of daily life, and some landscape views are also included. Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who assisted the Lomaxes on expeditions to Georgia and Florida, has been identified in a few photographs. (Subset of the above)

Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938 to 1943 consists of approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia. The documentation was created by John Wesley Work III in 1941 and by Lewis Jones and Willis Laurence James in March, June, and July 1943. Also included are recordings made in Tennessee and Alabama (including six Sacred Harp songs) by John Work between September 1938 and 1941.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

The National Museum of African American History and Culture provides online access to images of artefacts, documents, videos, sound recordings and more that reflect everything from great movements and moments to daily life among African Americans and the country at large. The Collections are arranged topically and can be browsed through the links below: