African American Studies: Home

-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.

A database currently featuring 271 scholarly journals published in Africa, in a variety of disciplines. Abstracts are available for all articles.

The first African-American owned and operated newspaper in the United States

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.

"A mailing list focused on genealogical research and resources in general and on African ancestry in particular"

This site from the University of Massachusetts Special Collections offers researchers full text access to the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers.

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.

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 Truman's Executive Order 9981, profiled in the final section.

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 .)

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 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.

a selection from the over 500,000 pieces in the Sheet Music Collection at Brown University, with a concentration on the period 1840-1950.

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.

Read or listen to transcripts of speeches by famous African Americans.

This collection 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.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded 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.

An online full-text database of all publications issuied by the Commission between its beginning in 1957 and 2010.

-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 attitudes.

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