The following Web sites offer access to primary source information on African American history & culture. Many supply digitized images while the remainder provide transcripts or data extracted from primary sources. Cornell University's Guide to African American Documentary Resources is an excellent list of additional sites.

• Accessible Archives

  This database (ASU) provides searchable full-text access to 18th- and 19th-century newspapers and magazines including African American newspapers.

• African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: Freedom's Journal

  This site provides access to nearly 100 issues of the Freedom's Journal spanning March 1827 - March 1829.

• African-American Women: On-line Archival Collections

  These documents from Duke University's Special Collections Library include the memoirs, poems, and vignettes of Elizabeth Johnson Harris and slave letters from Vilet Lester and Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson

• Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1718-1820

  This searchable database provides information extracted from primary sources found in Louisiana, Texas, France, and Spain by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.

• American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library

  This site from the Library of Congress includes a vast array of primary sources relating to American history and culture. Of special interest are the:
  
  
  • Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress
  • The African-American Experience in Ohio 1850-1920
  • African American Odyssey
  • African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection 1818-1907
  • African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections of Brown University
  • Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
  • By Popular Demand: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s
  • The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780-1925
  • First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920
  • The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress
  • From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909
  • Maps of Liberia, 1830-1870
  • Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
  • William P. Gottlieb: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz

• American Missionary Association and the Promise of a Multicultural America: 1839-1954

  This collection from the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and the Louisiana State University Digital Library provides access to digitized images of documents and photographs. The images are searchable and browsable.

• Black Archives of Mid-America

  This collection, a collaborative project of the Black Archives of Mid-America, Inc. and the Kansas City Public Library, includes photographs, manuscripts, and oral histories.

• Booker T. Washington Papers

  This searchable site offers access to the 14-volume printed work.

• Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive

  Digitized images from the collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries chronicling events of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi will be added soon. Oral histories are currently available.

• Civil Rights Letters and Posters

  These documents are part of the Joseph and Nancy Ellin Freedom Summer Project Collection located at the University of Southern Mississippi. The Ellins, educators and civil rights workers, taught in Freedom Schools in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1964.

• Digital Schomburg Images of African Americans from the 19th Century

  This site focuses on family, labor, education, organizations, religion, slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction, and social life and customs. Also included are transcripts from the African American Women Writers of the 19th Century collection.

• Documenting the American South

  This searchable collection from the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is notable for its:
  
  
  • The Church in the Southern Black Community
  • First-Person Narratives of the American South
  • Library of Southern Literature
  • North American Slave Narratives
  • The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940
  • North Carolinians and the Great War
  • The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865

• The Dred Scott Case

  Check here for digitized images of documents related to this significant case.

• Freedmen and Southern Society Project

  This site includes transcripts of primary source documents, some of which are accompanied by digitized images, from the multi-volume set Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. The documents include slave letters, military correspondence, and letters from freedmen.

• Freedmen's Bureau Online

  Transcripts of a variety of documents from the Freedmen's Bureau, which was formed to supervise "relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen" after the Civil War are provided here.

• Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room

  The documents available here are scanned images of items requested from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents are listed alphabetically. The following are of special interest:
  
  
• Atlanta Child Murders
• Black Panther Party - Winston Salem, NC
• Deacons for Defense and Justice
• W.E.B. DuBois
• Wallace D. Fard
• Five Percenters
• Ku Klux Klan
• Stanley Levison
• Malcolm X
• Thurgood Marshall
• MIBURN (Mississippi Burning)
• Elijah Muhammad
• Mack Charles Parker
• Paul and Eslanda Robeson
• Jackie Robinson
• Clarence 13x Smith
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
• Roy Wilkins

• Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

  This site provides digitized images and transcripts of the March 1925 Survey Graphic Harlem Number, a magazine issue "devoted to the African American 'Renaissance' underway in Harlem."

• Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs


These photographs taken by educational reformer Jackson Davis in the American South are searchable. Also included are papers donated to the University of Virginia's Special Collections by his daughters and granddaughters.

• Making of America

  These sites from the University of Michigan and Cornell University digitize images of periodicals and books from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

• National Archives & Records Administration

  This growing collection of digitized images includes photographs, maps, government correspondence, and much more. The following Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans are also of interest:
  
  
  • The Amistad Case
  • Beyond the Playing Field - Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Advocate
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
  • Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Memphis Sanitation Workers
  • Documents Related to Brown v. Board of Education
  • The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War
  • Frontiers in Civil Rights: The Dorothy Davis Case
  • The Many Faces of Paul Robeson
  • Photographs of the 369th Infantry and African Americans During World War I

• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection

  Digital images of documents from this "substantial collection of pamphlets, books, newspapers, and manuscripts" donated to Cornell University by teacher, minister, humanitarian, pacifist, and abolitionist Samuel J. May are available here.

• Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices From The Special Collections Library

  These digitized images, transcripts, and descriptions are from documents in the Special Collections Library at Duke University. They cover the time period from the late 18th century through the 19th century.

• Virginia Center for Digital History

  This site offers access to "a number of digital projects spanning the range of American history, from the Jamestown settlement, to the Civil War, to the Civil Rights movement." Among those of interest for research on African-American history and culture are:
  
  
• Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South
• Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950-1970
• The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War