African American Studies

Current news and several runs of historical Black newspapers.

From NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Freedom's Journal was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. and other free black men in New York City, it was published weekly as a four-page, four-column newspaper, starting with the March 16, 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada.

An online exhibit and digital collection. Freedom Summer was an effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system. Northern volunteers and black Mississippians risked their lives to overturn racist institutions.

Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States.
His photographs — most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved — provide a unique view of southern education during the first half of the twentieth century.

9, 0000 interviews are online, keyword searchable.

Includes Avery Research Center collections on African Americans in Charleston

The blog of the Black History Guide, sharing records relating to the African American experience at the National Archives.

By Jennifer Gregory and Bridget B. Striker

This collection contains material relating to the life and work of Septima P. Clark. The biographical papers include tributes, clippings, certificates, awards, family correspondence and transcripts of various oral history interviews.

The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history.

THE ROAD TO BROWN tells the story of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as the culmination of a brilliant legal assault on segregation that launched the Civil Rights movement.

This film examines the long road to civil rights, when the deep contradictions in American society finally became unsustainable. African Americans who fought fascism in World War II came home to face the same old racial violence.

One hundred years after the destruction of the Black-owned Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history, residents and descendants examine the history of the 1921 tragedy and its aftermath. Through the historical lens of white violence and Black resistance, the film explores vital issues of atonement, reconciliation and reparation.

Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today.