African American History: Primary Sources

Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Anti-Slavery Examiner appealed to the people of the United States to unite with the Society in maintaining common and unquestioned political rights. Speeches and letters on anti-slavery were reprinted. Testimony from slaveholders and other material taken mainly from slave state newspapers attempted to present slavery as it was.

Provided by the Library of Congress, American Memory

Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 photographs of former enslaved people. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)

Includes data and information on nearly 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Database enables searching by ship, nation, voyage dates, slave characteristics, place voyage began/ended, and more.

Papers of the 19th African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Transatlantic Slave Trade brought twelve million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World as part of a broad exchange of trade goods between England, West Africa, South America, the West Indies, and the United States.

W. E. B. Du Bois founded The Crisis in 1910, as the house magazine of the fledgling NAACP, a widely read and influential periodical about race and social injustice.

The Crisis Magazine, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color.

The Antislavery Collection contains several hundred printed pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911. The holdings include speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. It was established by Act of Congress in 2003, following decades of efforts to promote and highlight the contributions of African Americans.

Selected volumes, 1961-1976. Founded in 1943, Negro Digest (later “Black World”) was the publication that launched Johnson Publishing. During the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement, Negro Digest/Black World served as a critical vehicle for political thought for supporters of the movement.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.

The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which the United States of America is built, and by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as the nation's birth year. By placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story citizens tell of themselves and about who they are as a country, the hope is to paint a fuller picture of the institution that shaped the nation. The project consists of essays on different aspects of contemporary American life, from mass incarceration to rush-hour traffic, that have their roots in slavery and its aftermath. Alongside the essays are 17 original literary works that bring to life key moments in African-American history over the past 400 years, and a special section from the New York Times newspaper on the history of slavery made in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution.

Primary sources and other materials from libraries, archives, museums, and public broadcasters.

Digital Archive from U. of Michigan includes documents and images about the historically significant case.

FBI Files on African American authors and literary institutions obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

A collection of materials from across the Civil Rights movement era in the mid-20th century

James H. "Jim" Peppler, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a staff photographer of the weekly paper, The Southern Courier, from July 1965 to mid-1968. Founded by staff members of The Harvard Crimson, the Courier recruited a biracial staff of both students and professional journalists from many parts of the country, with the goal of providing objective reporting on civil rights and social issues. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, the Courier staff published 175 issues from July 1965 to December 1968.