HIST 20: Why Black History Matters

Below is a sample of primary source websites.  Please carefully evaluate any website--click on the blue Evaluation tab in the navigation pane to learn how to evaluate your sources.

• African American Perspectives "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."
• Behind the Veil "A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s."
• Black Abolitionist Archive "From the 1820s to the Civil War, African Americans assumed prominent roles in the transatlantic struggle to abolish slavery. In contrast to the popular belief that the abolitionist crusade was driven by wealthy whites, some 300 black abolitionists were regularly involved in the antislavery movement, heightening its credibility and broadening its agenda. The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. These important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement; scans of these documents are provided as images and PDF files."
• Black Freedom Struggle "featuring select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history"
• Booker T. Washington: A Resource Guide Part of Library of Congress Digital Resources Collections.
• 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."
• Civil Rights Digital Library "The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale." (University of Georgia)
• Civil Rights History Project "On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directed the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a national survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record and make widely accessible new interviews with people who participated in the struggle. The project was initiated in 2010 with the survey and with interviews beginning in 2011."
• Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery "Learn more about enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum Periods. Analyze and compare archaeological assemblages and architectural plans from different sites at unprecedented levels of detail. DAACS is a community resource, conceived and maintained in the Department of Archaeology at Monticello, in collaboration with the research institutions and archaeologists working throughout the Atlantic World."
• Digital Archive: Brown v. Board of Education "This archive contains documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present. The archive is divided into four main areas of interest: Supreme Court cases; busing and school integration efforts in northern urban areas; school integration in the Ann Arbor Public School District; and recent resegregation trends in American schools." (University of Michigan)
• Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
• 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."
• 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."
• Harlem Renaissance Library of Congress primary source set.
• In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience "n Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents more than 16,500 pages of texts, 8,300 illustrations, and more than 60 maps. The Web site is organized around thirteen defining migrations that have formed and transformed African America and the nation." Provided by the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture.
• North American Slave Narratives ""North American Slave Narratives" collectsbooks and articles that document the individual and collective story ofAfrican Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth,nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all theexisting autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves publishedas broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included aremany of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significantfictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920."
• Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement "The voices of the civil rights movement swelled into a wave of protest that profoundly changed America. This collection of interviews seeks to make this massive movement local and understandable by reducing it into its smallest parts—the people that participated, in small and large ways. These people were former slaves who taught their children the value of education, or high school principals who insisted on punctuality. Drawing together interviews from a variety of Southern Oral History Program collections, this cluster includes interviews with students and teachers at West Charlotte High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the successes of integration are encountering the realities of a segregated past; the difficult transition to integrated schooling for students at the all-black Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and the roles of black workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This collection gives voice to the voices, loud and soft, of the movement to desegregate public life in the South" (University of North Carolina)
• Rosa Parks Papers "The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) 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. "
• Slaves and the Courts, 1740 to 1860 " consists of 105 library books and manuscripts, totalling approximately 8,700 pages drawn principally from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, with a few from the General Collections. The selection was guided in large part by the entries in Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases by Paul Finkelman (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985), which was based on research in the Library collections. The documents comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance."
• Slave Voyages "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 mostly unnamed 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."
• Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories "The 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. "
• Who Speaks for the Negro: An Archival Collection

Please note:  Descriptions (click on information icon) have been taken from the websites.