AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

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African American Resources Arranged by Subject

Art

• Art@Howard (Howard University)
• Artists by Nationality: African-American Artists (Art Cyclopedia)
• ArtNoir Showcase
• Black American Artists (Ask Art)
• David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the Diaspora (University of Maryland)
• Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art (University of Delaware)
• Smithsonian: African American History and Culture
  Includes descriptions of museum collections, reading lists and exhibitions on a wide array of subjects including art, aviation, dance, history, music, and politics.
• Studio Museum of Harlem

Biography

Individuals

• The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project (University of California, Los Angeles)
  In addition to providing an overview of the documentary project focusing on Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the site also provides sample documents, photographs, and audio files.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. (Seattle Times)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute (Stanford University)
• Jackie Robinson Website (CMG Worldwide)
• Sojourner Truth Institute
• Malcolm X: A Research Site (University of Toledo and Twenty-first Century Books)

Collective Sites

• African-American History - Biographical Entries from the Handbook of Texas Online (General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association)
• Biographies of Historical Women and Useful Links to Related Pages (Women's Resources Database, University of Maryland)
  This site provides brief biographical sketches of the following African American women: Mary McLeod Bethune, Lorraine Hansberry, Wilma Rudolph, Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Phillis Wheatley.

Business and Economics

• blackenterprise.com
  Hosted by the popular magazine Black Enterpise, this site focuses on African American businesses and markets. It includes news items, its own rankings of major African American companies, and directory information on small black businesses.
• Minority Business Development Agency (U.S. Dept. of Commerce)
  The MBDA, which was created to encourage the the growth of minority-owned businesses in the United States, features on its web site statistics, reports, speeches, and other publications that focus on minority-owned businesses. It also provides a database to connect minority-owned businesses with contract opportunities. The site also links to local Minority Business Development Centers and to many related web sites.
• Minority Business Enterprises Legal Defense & Education Fund
  An advocacy group that focuses on domestic and international policies affecting minority enterprises, the MBELDEF includes on its web site various alerts and press releases on legislation, court rulings and other initiatives, some of which pertain to affirmative action.
• National Black Chamber of Commerce
  A trade association that focuses on issues relating to economics and entrepreneurship in the African American community. The NBCC web site includes news, press releases, and editorials.
• Surveys of Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (U.S. Census Bureau)
  This site provides comparative economic data, from 1992 and later years, on business owners' race, ethnicity, and gender.

Civil Rights

• The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
• Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice
  This site features speeches, testimonies, reports, and supporting documentation on cases that the Dept. of Justice has recently investigated. Included are reports regarding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and black church arsons.
• Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive (University of Southern Mississippi)
  A digitized collection of oral histories, manuscripts, and other special collections materials.
• civilrights.org
  A joint project of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, this site serves as a clearinghouse for information on contemporary human and civil rights issues.
• The Civil Rights Project (Harvard University)
  A major project designed to assess “the prospects for justice and equal opportunity under law for racial and ethnic minorities in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” The site includes several reports regarding school resegregation, college admissions, and affirmative action.
• Uniform Crime Reports (Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. of Justice)
  Provides annual hate crime statistics dating back to 1995.
• Initial Report of the United States of America to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, September 2000 (U.S. State Department)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute (Stanford University)
• The National Civil Rights Museum
• Southern Poverty Law Center
• U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
  The agency's publications include the Civil Rights Directory of governmental and private organizations, as well as reports outlining investigations into various civil rights abuses.
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
  This site provides laws, reports, statistics and other information pertaining to employment discrimination.

Computing

• Digital Divide Network (Benton Foundation)
  Produced by the Benton Foundation in association with the National Urban League, the Digital Divide Network seeks to “enable and facilitate the sharing of ideas, information and creative solutions among industry partners, private foundations, nonprofit organizations and governments.”
• Pew Internet & American Life Project (Pew Research Center)
  Included amongst the site’s many research reports is its “African-Americans and the Internet” report which examines how African Americans use the Internet.

Criminal Justice

• The Sentencing Project
  This site provides criminal justice policy analysis, data, reports and other information on sentencing issues.

Delaware and Other Regional Resources

• Delaware Public Archives
  The site's digital archives present numerous documents and photographs pertaining to Delaware black history. Included are manumission records of enslaved Delawareans, records pertaining to school desegregation, historic photographs of African American schools and churches, and other archival materials. A search of DPA finding aids will yield information on records available at the Archives which are not yet available online.
• EEO and Diversity Group, State Personnel Office (State of Delaware)
  This group aims to create a more diverse work environment and increase cultural diversity among Delaware state employees.
• Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware (Paul Heinegg)
  A publication that seeks to outline the "history of the free African American community as told through the family history of most African Americans who were free in the Southeast during the colonial period."
• Iron Hill School: An African-American One-Room School (National Park Service)
  A lesson plan that is based on the National Register of Historic Places registration file “Iron Hill School Number 112C”. Constructed in 1923 as part of philanthropist Pierre Samuel du Pont’s “Delaware experiment,” the school was one of more than 80 schools built for African American children between 1919 and 1928. The website includes interviews with former pupils, photographs, and other source materials.
• Manuscript Collection (Historical Society of Delaware)
  A listing of manuscript collections available at HSD, including papers of the Abolition Society of Delaware, the African School Society, the Delaware Association for the Moral Improvement and Education of the Colored People of the State, and the Mother African Union Methodist Protestant Church.
• Marks, Carole, ed. A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore (University of Delaware)
  A collection of essays that provides an introductory examination of the history of African Americans in the region.
• Research Guide to African-American Sources in Special Collections (University of Delaware Library)
  A description of rare books, manuscripts, photographs and other unique materials held by the Department of Special Collections. Links to manuscript collection finding aids are provided.

Education

• African and African American Studies Department (School District of Philadelphia)
  Developed by Philadelphia School District teachers, the site includes lessons and activities pertaining to African and African American history and culture.
• African Studies Outreach K-12 Resources (University of Wisconsin-Madison African Studies Program)
  Contains curriculum materials pertaining to Africa and the African diaspora.
• The Civil Rights Project (Harvard University)
  A major project designed to assess “the prospects for justice and equal opportunity under law for racial and ethnic minorities in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” The site includes several reports regarding school resegregation, college admissions, and affirmative action.
• Digital History: African American Voices
  Designed to support the teaching of American history in K-12 schools, the site provides textbook information, along with primary source material on slavery, the middle passage, resistance, and emancipation. The site also includes lesson plans, modules and handouts for teachers.
• Edsitement: U.S. History--African-American: Lesson Plans (National Endowment for the Humanities)
  Includes web sites, lesson plans, at-home activities, and other learning activities.
• Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute
  Includes statistical data on African Americans in higher education.
• The Gateway to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Digital Learning Lab, Howard University)
  A site that features links to HBCU websites, and related news and events.
• MOLIS: Minority On-Line Information Service
  This site provides information on minority institutions, including historically black colleges and universities.
• Office for Civil Rights (U.S. Dept. of Education)
  Includes documents, pamphlets, notices, and other publications relating to the enforcement of civil rights laws at all educational levels.
• United Negro College Fund
  In addition to links to member colleges, the site provides information on scholarships, fellowships and internships.

Film

• African-American Studies (Media Resource Center, Moffit Library, UC Berkeley)
• Black Film Center/Archive (Indiana University)
• California Newsreel
• Films, DVD's & Video for African American Studies (First Run/Icarus Films)

Gay and Lesbian Resources

• Black Gay & Lesbian Archive Project

Health

• MedlinePlus: African American Health (National Library of Medicine)
• Meharry Medical College
• Morehouse School of Medicine
• National Medical Association
• National Minority AIDS Council
• Office of Minority Health (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services )

History

• African American Electronic Texts (University of Delaware Library)
  This site provides links to fulltext publications related to African Americans.
• African-Americans in the U.S. Army (U.S. Army Center of Military History)
  Included are brief essays and photographs outlining African American contributions to the U.S. Army.
• Africans in America (WGBH Interactive for PBS Online)
  Prepared as a companion to the six-hour public television series of the same name, this site chronicles the history of slavery in America from the 16th century through the end of the Civil War in 1865. The site provides a narrative, a teacher's guide and more than 400 primary source items.
• AfriGeneas: African Ancestored Genealogy
  A site for African American genealogical sources, AfriGeneas provides an overview to genealogical research. It also provides census information, slave data, and other historical information useful for tracing one's ancestry.
• American Digital Library on American Slavery (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
  A searchable database of legal petitions filed from 1777 to 1867 in all fifteen slaveholding states in the U.S.  Abstracts of the petitions provide information on the nature of the petition, as well as personal details regarding the petitioners and other parties mentioned in the petition including slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color.  It is searchable by name, date, state and keyword and is browsable by subject.
• American Memory (Library of Congress)
  This digitization project features several collections that are important to African American Studies, including: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project; the Daniel P. Murray African American Pamphlets; the photographs of Matthew Brady, William P. Gottlieb and Carl Van Vechten; the interviews of the WPA Federal Writers' Folklore Project; and the African American Odyssey and Jackie Robinson exhibitions. Recent additions to the site include the Frederick Douglass Papers and the Zora Neale Hurston Plays.
• American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology (University of Virginia)
• Black History at HarpWeek
• Black Panther Research Project (Stanford University)
• Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (National Park Service)
  To access data on U.S. Colored Troops, go to “Regiments” then use the drop down menu for “states or origin” and select U.S. Colored Troops.
• Digital History: African American Voices
  Designed to support the teaching of American history in K-12 schools, the site provides textbook information, along with primary source material on slavery, the middle passage, resistance, and emancipation. The site also includes lesson plans, modules and handouts for teachers.
• Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  This collection of documentary sources on the American South includes components on “North American Slave Narratives” and “The Church in the Southern Black Community.”
• Documents on Slavery (The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School)
• FBI Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room
  This site provides access to FBI documents from the Freedom of Information Act Reading Room at FBI Headquarters in Arlington, VA. Extensive files are available on the following individuals and topics: Josephine Baker, Black Panther Pary, W. E. B. Du Bois, W. D. Fard, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X (Little), Thurgood Marshall, Elijah Muhammad, Paul Robeson, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committtee (SNCC), and others.
• Freedmen and Southern Society Project (University of Maryland)
  A project designed to document the experience of newly liberated African Americans. The site provides an overview of the project, a timeline for the period covered, and sample documents from the scholarly publication that resulted from the project.
• From Freedom's Shadow: African Americans & the United States Capitol (United States Capitol Historical Society)
  An online exhibition providing documents that outline the role of enslaved African Americans in the construction of the U.S. Capitol.
• Historical Text Archive
  More than 600 articles, 70 books and thousands of links to sites with historical content. Each section of the site contains links to African American related sites.
• A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland's Eastern Shore (University of Delaware)
  A collection of essays edited by Carole A Marks that provide an introductory examination of the history of African Americans in the region.
• Images of African Americans from the 19th Century (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL)
• In Motion (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library)
  A rich web site that focuses on the migrations, both forced and voluntary, of people of African descent. Historical texts and essays, photographs and maps outline migrations dating from the 1400s to the present. In addition to the transatlantic slave trade, the site also documents the movements of African Americans within the United States, Haitian and Caribbean migrations to the U.S., recent African immigration to America, and back to Africa movements. Timelines and lesson plans are also included.
• The Jackson Davis Collection of African-American Educational Photographs (University of Virginia)
  A collection of photographs of African American educational scenes, taken during 1915-1930 in the southern United States by Jackson Davis of the General Education Board in New York, New York.
• The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project (University of California, Los Angeles)
  In addition to providing an overview of the documentary project focusing on Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the site also provides sample documents, photographs, and audio files.
• Our Shared History: Celebrating African American History & Culture (National Park Service)
  A site describing African American historic sites that are managed by the National Park Service. Included are sites connected to Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Tuskegee Airmen, the Underground Railroad, and Maggie L. Walker.
• Sailor, Maryland’s Public Information Network
  A comprehensive web site focusing on sources available to Maryland residents, Sailor includes a section on African Americans in Maryland. Also at Sailor are links to Maryland Digital Collections, including Views of African American Life in Maryland, a photograph collection digitized by the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
• Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (University of Wisconsin)
  Raw data and documentation pertaining to various slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Smithsonian: African American History and Culture
  Includes descriptions of museum collections, reading lists and exhibitions on a wide array of subjects including art, aviation, dance, history, music, and politics.
• Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party (University of California Berkeley Library)
  Prepared in conjunction with the Pacifica Foundation, the project provides videos, sound recordings and interviews with Black Panther Party members and other activists of the era.
• Teaching with Documents: Lesson Plans (National Archives and Records Administration)
  Includes primary documents from the holdings of the National Archives on the topics such as: the Amistad case, black soldiers in the Civil War, African Americans during World War I, Brown v. Board of Education, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the Memphis Sanitation Workers, and the Civil Rights Act..
• The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (University of Virginia)
  This site examines two communities, one Northern and one Southern, during the Civil War era. Included are letters, diaries, and other writings of enslaved Africans from Augusta County, Virginia, along with historical accounts of free blacks living in Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

Literature

• African American Electronic Texts (University of Delaware Library)
  This site provides links to fulltext publications related to African Americans.
• Antislavery Literature Project
  A project jointly sponsored by Arizona State University and the EServer at Iowa State University that seeks to increase access to select historical texts and videos. In addition to tracts, speeches and narratives, the site also includes children's literature and abolitionist choral music.
• Black Issues Book Review: The African-American Book Publishing Authority
  A site for news on black authors and book publishing. Select book reviews are available.
• EServer: Race and Ethnicity
  Includes more than ten thousand texts in the humanities, including many on African Americans. Charles Chestnutt, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and Sojourner Truth are among the authors represented.
• Harlem, 1900-1940: An African American Community (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library)
  Includes a searchable database with links to fulltext resources on the writers, artists and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance.

Music and Performing Arts

• African Americans in the Performing Arts (Library of Congress)
  Several outstanding digital collections are available at this site including the African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, the Katherine Dunham Collection, The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, and the Zora Neale Hurston Plays. The site also links to “Now What a Time”: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943 which hosts blues and gospel sound recordings. Home Sweet Home: Life in Nineteenth-Century Ohio provides information on minstrel music and includes a teaching resource on Jim Crow in America. A finding aid to the Charles Mingus collection is also available.
• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
  Includes a history and timeline of the dance company.
• America's Jazz Heritage (Smithsonian Institution)
• Archives of African American Music and Culture (Indiana University)
• Center for Black Music Research (Columbia College, Chicago)
• Duke Ellington Collection (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)
• Marian Anderson: A Life in Song (University of Pennsylvania)
• Marian Anderson Collection of Photographs, 1898-1992 (University of Pennsylvania)
• William P. Gottlieb Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz (Library of Congress)

Pan-Africanism

• All-African People's Revolutionary Party
  Includes a video clip of Kwame Nkrumah, along with excerpts of speeches, interviews and writings of Kwame Toure (formerly Stokely Carmichael), Sekou Toure, Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe and others.
• African History - Pan-Africanism (Stanford University)
• TransAfrica Forum
  Provides news, articles and commentaries from an organization that "serves as a major research, educational, and organizing institution for the African-American community offering constructive analyses of issues concerning U.S. policy as it affects Africa and the Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America."

Politics and Government

• Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
  The site provides information on the policies and initiatives of the CBC Foundation and links to the sites of Caucus members.
• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
  This site provides fulltext reports, poll data, statistics and other publications relating to black elected officials and public policy issues affecting African Americans and other minorities.
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Online
• National Urban League
• Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
  Contains an archive of Rev. Jesse Jackson's recent speeches.

Religion

• African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project (Amherst College)
  A project seeking to "produce a comprehensive historical interpretation of African-American religion, from the earliest African-European encounters along the west coast of Africa to the present day."
• The Church in the Southern Black Community (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
  A part of the Documenting the American South Project, this electronic text collection “traces how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life”.
• Nation of Islam
  Provides official statements from the NOI.
• The North Star: A Journal of African-American Religious History

Science

• ACS Diversity Programs(American Chemical Society)
  Includes information on ACS programs pertaining to African Americans and other scientists of color. The site also includes links to historically black colleges with ACS approved chemistry departments, to organizations having minority affairs programs, and to scholarship and fellowship information.
• Black Inventor Online Museum
• The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences

Statistical Data

• Uniform Crime Reports (Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. of Justice)
  Provides annual hate crime statistics dating back to 1995.
• Minority Links: Facts on the Black/African American Population (U.S. Census Bureau)
  One of the best sources of statistics on African-Americans is the U.S. Census Bureau. The site provides links to data on a wide variety of social and economic issues relating to African-Americans. The site also has links to its annual African American History Month feature.

Women’s Studies

• African-American and Race Relations: Selected Primary Sources in the Sophia Smith Collection and College Archives (Smith College)
  A guide to those manuscript and archival materials relating to African-Americans that form part of the Smith College library special collections and the College Archives. The guide is comprised of brief entries describing the individual collections; the collections themselves have not been digitized.
• African-American Women: On-line Archival Collections (Duke University)
  This site includes digitized images of letters, memoirs and other writings of several nineteenth-century African-American women.
• African American Women Writers of the 19th Century (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL)
  A digital collection of more than 50 published works by authors such as Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet A. Jacobs, Jarena Lee, Mary Prince, Nancy Prince, and Maria W. Stewart.
• American Women's History: A Research Guide - African-American Women (Middle Tennessee State University)
  A well-annotated guide to research materials in print and on the Internet that pertain to African-American women's history.
• Essence Online
• Guide to Resources on Women in the Processed Manuscript Collections of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University)
  This guide provides brief descriptions of the Center's extensive archival holdings relating to African-American women. The manuscripts themselves have not been reproduced digitally, but select images have been included on the site.
• National Archives for Black Women's History (National Parks Service)
  The National Archives for Black Women's History documents the history of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women, and other African-American women's organizations. The archives are located in the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, an historic house museum administered by the National Park Service. The web site provides information on the Bethune house and archives and links to several photographs of Mary McLeod Bethune.
• National Council of Negro Women, Inc.
  The NCNW is an umbrella organization for a diverse group of women's organizations. Founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethure, the NCNW sponsors a web site which provides information on its history, current programs and membership.
• Retrieving African-American Women's History: A Methodological Guide to Manuscript Sources in the Special Collections Library at Duke University
  This guide describes archival collections at Duke University that are useful for the study of African-American's Women's History. The collections themselves have not been digitized.
• Womanist Theory and Research On-line (University of Georgia)