Digital Archives: African American

A database of modern and contemporary African-American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. Features 10,000 poems by around 70 of the most important African-American poets of the last century.

Accessible Archives offers several historic collections, from African American newspapers to Civil War periodicals.

Nearly 3,000 full-text poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 600 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.

Award-winning documentaries, newsreels, interviews and archival footage surveying black culture in the United States.

Searchable fulltext for writings by women from Africa and the African diaspora worldwide. Includes more than 460 fiction, nonfiction, and poetry texts in more than 100,000 pages in English, French, French Creole, Portuguese, and Luganda. Slightly more than half of titles are American, with Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, and Senegal well-represented among the two dozen countries covered.

The first African American novel, Clotel was published when its author was still legally a slave. This digital edition presents, for the first time together, the full extant texts of the novel’s four versions, published between 1853 and 1867. Imaged and coded, the fully searchable texts may be read individually or in parallel and are accompanied by generous biographical, critical, and historical commentary as well as line-by-line annotations and textual collation.

Full text, comprehensive archival database providing access to more than 400,000 articles in nearly 200 ethnic, minority and native press newspapers, magazines, and journals. Full text archive of Phila Tribune, Jewish Exponent , and nearly 200 other ethnic, minority and native press newspapers, magazines, and journals -- both English and Spanish.

Composed of FBI surveillance files on the activities of the African Liberation Support Committee and All African People’s Revolutionary Party; this collection provides two unique views on African American support for liberation struggles in Africa, the issue of Pan-Africanism, and the role of African independence movements as political leverage for domestic Black struggles.

Consists of two major collections comprising myriad subseries. The Roger Baldwin Years, 1912-1950, contains subseries with clippings and files on academic freedom; censorship; legislation; federal departments and federal legislation; state activities; conscientious objectors; injunctions; and labor and labor organization correspondence. Years of Expansion, 1950-1990, encompasses foundation project files on the Amnesty Project, 1964-1980; the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, 1964-1976; and subject files on freedom of belief, expression, and association; due process of law; equality before the law; international civil liberties; and legal case files, 1933-1990.

Comprised of never-before-digitized materials, this unique collection documents the ACLU’s legal battle to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in thirteen Southern states…Consisting of case files, correspondence, newspaper clippings, manuscripts, and more, this collection offers a primary source perspective on civil rights issues from voting rights to the dismantling of the Jim Crow system.

Features more than 10,000 articles by top scholars in the field, over 1,750 images, more than 300 primary sources with specially written commentaries, nearly 150 maps, 150 charts and tables, and over 6,000 biographies. The core content includes: Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience, second ed.; Encyclopedia of African American history, 1619-1895; Encyclopedia of African American history, 1896 to the present; Black women in America, second ed.; African American national biography.

The collection consists of materials from the years 1913 through 1998 that document African American author and activist Amiri Baraka and were gathered by Dr. Komozi Woodard in the course of his research. The extensive documentation includes poetry, organizational records, print publications, articles, plays, speeches, personal correspondence, oral histories, as well as some personal records. The materials cover Baraka's involvement in the politics in Newark, N.J. and in Black Power movement organizations such as the Congress of African People, the National Black Conference movement, the Black Women's United Front. Later materials document Baraka's increasing involvement in Marxism.

The Organizational Records and Personal Papers bring a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle.The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.

The Organizational Records and Personal Papers bring a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle.The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.

Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problems in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict. This resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.