African American Studies: Home

Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits- This website presents the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.  The portraits that make up the exhibition span 150 years. The title is drawn from an address delivered on August 16, 1843 by the abolitionist clergyman Henry Highland Garnet to a group of free blacks in the North who had gathered to discuss the future prospects of their community.

• African Union
• Association of Black Psychologists
• Association of Black Sociologists
• Congressional Black Caucus
• Nation of Islam
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• NAACP: A Century in the Fight For Freedom
• National Black Justice Coalition-Since 2003, the Coalition has provided leadership at the intersection of mainstream civil rights groups and mainstream LGBT organizations, advocating for the unique challenges and needs of the African American LGBT community that are often relegated to the sidelines. 
• National Urban League
• Organization of Black Screenwriters
• U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
• United Negro College Fund

• African Journals Online - A database currently featuring 271 scholarly journals published in Africa, in a variety of disciplines. Abstracts are available for all articles.
• African Studies Quarterly: The Online Journal of African Studies
• allAfrica
• Callaloo
• Freedom's Journal (1827-1829) - The first African-American owned and operated newspaper in the United States
• Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies
• The Crisis - "The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). [Today it] continues as a current-affairs journal, and a recent digitization project sponsored by Google has made the complete run of the publication." -- from the Scouting Report, Dec. 18, 2009.
• The North Star: A Journal of African-American Religious History
• Western Journal of Black Studies Online Journal

• African National Congress
• Afrigeneas - "A mailing list focused on genealogical research and resources in general and on African ancestry in particular"
• University of Pennsylvania: Center for Africana Studies - E-journals/news services
• Unknown No Longer ( Virginia Historical Society )- A unique database of Virginia slave names which reaches back to the 1690s.

• American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library

• Amistad Research Center (Tulane University)

• Born in Slavery: Selections from the WPA American Slave Narratives - "Complete texts of seventeen of the 2,300 slave narratives collected as part of the Federal Writers Project".

• Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South 

  Black Film Center and Archive ( Indiana University ) - "A repository of films and related materials on African Americans."

• Center for Black Music Research ( Columbia College, Chicago )

• Credo ( University of Massachusette )- This site from the University of Massachusetts Special Collections offers researchers full text access to the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers.

• Dred Scott Case Collection ( Washington University St. Louis )

• Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery

• Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project

• Minority Health and Health Equity Archive ( University of Maryland )

• Museum of African-American History (Boston)

• National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

• Celebrating African American History and Culture

• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Festivals and Culture

• The Katherine Dunham Collection at the Library of Congress

• The King Center: Beloved Community Network

  The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change 

• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute - Secondary documents written about Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as primary documents written during King's life.

• The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony - During the Civil War, Union-occupied Roanoke Island, which lies between the North Carolina mainland and the barrier islands known as the Outer Banks, became home to thousands of former slaves. Initially, these refugees settled near the Union headquarters, creating a community that included churches and a school. In the spring of 1863, this camp evolved into a government-sanctioned colony. This site presents an introduction to the colony and the colonial experiment that was conducted there. It also features some primary sources and projects for students.

• Ross Archive of African Images

• African American Odyssey - The purpose of this virtual exhibition is to "give a comprehensive, rich picture of more than 200 years of African American struggle and achievement." This site is organized in nine sections, among them, Slavery, The Civil War, Reconstruction, Depression, New Deal, World War II, and Civil Rights.
• Association of African American Museums
• Black Loyalists - A digital collection of primary and secondary documents tracing the history of the African Americans who accepted the British promise (first stated by Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia in a 1775 proclamation included in this collection) during the American Revolution that any slave of a rebel who came over to their side would be granted freedom and land. The 30,000 men and women who acted on this offer found themselves at war's end in Nova Scotia, and the promised land never materialized, leading many to emigrate to Sierra Leone.
• Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators - Housed at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, this colorful site traces the entry of African Americans into both civilian and military pilot corps. The first section begins with the story of Bessie Coleman, who became the first licensed black pilot in 1922 (although she had to study in France, and died young in 1926), and follows the growth of her successors up to 1934. The training provided at six black colleges and the Tuskegee Institute prior to World War II and the birth of the Tuskegee 99th Fighter Squadron in 1941 is covered in the second section. The 99th was joined by three other squadrons- the 100th, 301st and 302nd during World War II, where they combined into the 332nd Fighter Group, the famous ô Red Tails ô, whose colorful history is chronicled in the third section. The final death blow to segregation within the Armed Forces was given by President TrumanÆs Executive Order 9981, profiled in the final section.
• Cycles: African Life Through Art ( Indianapolis Museum of Art )
• Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project -Charles " Teenie" Harris served as a staff photographer for the influential newspaper the PIttsburgh Courier from the 1930s to the 1970s and left a legacy of over 80,000 images of life in the city's African American community. This site offers access to the collection ( now housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art .)
• Henry Ossawa. Tanner
• National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, Tennessee)
• Studio Museum in Harlem
• Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity

• African American Women Writers of the 19th century - This site makes available several dozen works, each text scrupulously reprinted with no posthumous editing, each preface intact, from 30 hitherto inaccessible volumes of 19th century African American women's literature. This site is well organized, providing search tools that allow the reader to search by title, author, and genre.
• The Coretta Scott King Book Awards
• Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives
• Islamic Manuscripts from Mali
• Jackson Davis Collection - A collection of over 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students, taken in the first half of the twentieth century. Davis' goal was to show the terrible conditions in many black schools and how they could be improved. The collection is housed at the University of Virginia.
• Oxford African American Studies Center: Focus on Women and Literature
• Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection
• The Zora Neal Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress - The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress present a selection of ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until they were rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection.

• Alberto del Pozo
• Official Kwanzaa Website

• "With An Even Hand" Brown v. Board at Fifty
• Africa Focus: Sights and Sounds of a Continent
• African American Sheet Music, 1820-1920 - a selection from the over 500,000 pieces in the Sheet Music Collection at Brown University, with a concentration on the period 1840-1950.
• African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection
• African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts
• African Diaspora Archaeology Network
• African Elections Project
• African-American Band Music and Recordings
• Africans in America - Intended as a teaching adjunct to a six-hour public television series covering the history of slavery in the US from its beginning to the end of the Civil War, this well-organized site is divided into four sections. The first, The Terrible Transformation, deals the period between 1450 and 1750, followed by The Revolution (1750-1805). Brotherly Love (1791-1831) illuminates the world of the free blacks using the Philadelphia community as an example. The last section, Judgment Day (1831-1865) traces the more familiar story of slavery during the years leading up to and during the Civil War.
• Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1719-1820
• An Address to the Colored Citizens of the United States by John B. Meachum (Philadelphia, 1846)
• Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu, Library of Congress
• Artists in Dialogue: António Ole and Aimé Mpane
• Avalon Project at Yale Law School: African-Americans-- Biography, Autobiography and History
• Benin-Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria
• Black Europeans
• Black Grooves : Archives of African American Music and Culture
• Black History at Harpweek
• African American Members of the United States Congress, 1870 - 2020
• Documenting the American South: The Church in the Southern Black Community
• Explorations in Black Leadership
• Free At Last? Slavery in Pittsburgh in the 18th and 19th Centuries
• Grass Roots: African Origins of An American Art
• Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts
• In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience
• Independent Lens: Banished -- American Ethnic Cleansings
• James B. Duke Memorial Library: Archives
• Job Sprawl and the Spatial Mismatch between Blacks and Jobs
• Mapping the African American Past
• Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power
• Paul Revere Williams Project
• Postcards from Manhattan: The Portrait Photography of Carl Van Vechten
• Race, Immigration and America's Changing Electorate
• Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches - Read or listen to transcripts of speeches by famous African Americans.
• Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 - This contains over a hundred pamphlets and books concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. This site is searchable by key word or browse by subject, author, or title index.
• Sonja Haynes Stone Center Library for Black Culture and History Guide to the Web
• Southern Poverty Law Center - The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded a quarter of a century ago for the purpose of winning equal rights for minorities and poor people through legal action. Today the Center continues to pursue action against those who would attack the freedoms of others, while also promoting tolerance, understanding, and justice through education and publicity. This site is well organized and leads the user to a wealth of material related to civil rights and civil liberties.
• The Black Renaissance in Washington, D.C., 1920s-1930s
• The Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the Silver Screen, 1912-1930s
• The Civil Rights Digital Library
• The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860 - 1960
• The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965-2000
• This Far By Faith: African American Spiritual Journeys
• Black Virginians, White Lenses: Images from the Cook Collection of Photographs - Over 300 images from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taken primarily in the Richmond and Central Virginia areas.
• Thurgood Marshall Law Library: Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights -An online full-text database of all publications issuied by the Commission between its beginning in 1957 and 2010.
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: a Multimedia Archive
• Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson -Created as a companion to the documentary film on Johnson by Ken Burns, this site both discusses the film project and gives detailed background on the Progressive era and its at titudes.
• " We Shall Overcome "; Speech by Dr.. Martin Luther KIng
• Wilbur "Buck" Clayton Collection
• Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson