A brief guide to Morris Library's Black history collections
From Sojourner Truth to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bessie Coleman (above) to Beyoncé, we have mountains of resources on Black history for you: books, original materials, digital archives, documentaries, and multimedia presentations that'll make history come alive. This guide is your starting point and we have so much more for you. Just ask!
Primary source collection detailing the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the massive, international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings and publications of the activists themselves.
Reproduces the writings and statements of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and its leaders. Also covers organizations that evolved from or were influenced by RAM and persons that had close ties to RAM. Individuals associated with RAM and documented in this collection include Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, General Gordon Baker Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Donald Freeman, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Herman Ferguson, Askia Muhammad Toure (Rolland Snellings), and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael).
The most prominent organization that evolved from RAM was the African People’s Party. Organizations influenced by RAM include the Black Panther Party, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Youth Organization for Black Unity, African Liberation Support Committee, and the Republic of New Africa. Individuals associated with RAM and documented in this collection include Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, General Gordon Baker Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Donald Freeman, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Herman Ferguson, Askia Muhammad Toure (Rolland Snellings), and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael).
Includes scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more. Combines Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index of Black Periodicals (IIBP), and The Chicago Defender.
Contains 1,297 sources with 1,098 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Where possible complete non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.
"[D]igital resource dedicated to identifying, classifying, and providing factual information and documentation about anti-Black killings in the mid-century South." Includes an interactive map of incidents.
"[S]earchable archive of digital materials related to the history of Christiansburg Industrial Institute and broader African American history in Southwest Virginia." The Institute was founded in 1866 to educate freed slaves and continued as to provide secondary education to Black students until closure in 1966.
First of its kind city-commissioned list of enslaved Black and Indigenous people living in Boston between 1641 and 1783. Over 2,500 individuals are included along with the surname of the family which enslaved them.
Collection of source materials for the major social movements and key figures in early twentieth century black history, generated between the early 1920s and early 1980s by the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation through widespread investigation of those deemed politically suspect.
Selected images from the archives of American photographer Gordon Parks. "Beginning in the 1940s, Gordon Parks documented American life and culture with a focus on social justice, race relations, the civil rights movement, and the African American experience."
Contains extensive FBI documentation on Meredith’s battle to enroll at The University of Mississippi in 1962 and white political and social backlash, as well as his correspondence with the NAACP and positive and negative letters he received from around the world during his ordeal.
Audio stories, interactive maps, a full-length film, and a research report with links to additional research and materials for educators exploring the history and impact of lynchings in the U.S.
Digital images and finding aids for the artifacts and documents at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University's archive and museum of Black history and culture.
Archived livestreams from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem featuring presentations by and about leading figures in Black culture and thought, prominent authors and scholars, and topics of current and historical interest.
Sizable online archive "dedicated to the preservation and free dissemination of endangered records documenting the history of Africans and their descendants across the Atlantic World."
Enormous archive the mission of which is "to collect, preserve, and disseminate the visual history of the [Los Angeles] region with an emphasis on ethnic minority communities and photographers." Important materials include the extensive African American collection, photography from Latin and Central America during the height of U.S. interference, documentation of the United Farmworkers union, and images of the U.S.-Mexico border and associated economic violence.
"An eight-volume set containing over 4,000 entries written and signed by distinguished scholars. In addition to Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., the AANB includes a wide range of African Americans from all time periods and all walks of life, both famous and nearly-forgotten."
"Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities."
"This book is a compact, exceptionally diverse introduction to the history of Black women, from the first African woman who arrived in America to the women of today."
"During the early Great Depression, African American women in the Midwest directly engaged with members of the American Communist Party to fight unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and racial discrimination in the workplace. This book highlights these struggles and brings them to the forefront of Black radicalism during the Great Depression, focusing on the cities of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis."
"Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty brings a fresh perspective to our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry--both black and white--through food, from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touchpoints in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine."
"This detailed yet comprehensive historiography charts the ways that local historians in Jackson County, Illinois, marginalized and silenced Native American, African American, and working-class experiences--especially the violence toward Indian and black actors--in favor of a history centered on white privilege and progress." Recipient of a Superior Achievement Award for scholarly books from the Illinois State Historical Society (ISHS).
"A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 80 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas--and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines -- historians and artists, journalists and novelists--each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America."
"This book is Clint Smith's contemporary portrait of the United States of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks, those that are honest about the past and those that are not, that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves."
"... engages ways in which African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggle for freedom and liberty as a feature of changes within the Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture how African Americans grappled with those questions, as the struggle for liberty in the United States continued through the end of the nineteenth century, when new regimes of power implemented systems of racial oppression that truncated what the historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries calls "Freedom Rights" for freedmen and women after the passing of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. This book charts the diverse ways in which African Americans utilized the Atlantic world in search of the ideals of liberty that they were denied at home. Black internationalism included emigration abroad, lecture tours in Europe denouncing slavery, and missionary activity in King Leopold's Congo, illustrating an international consciousness among black Americans."
"Examines the life of Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington, detailing his struggles as being openly gay and his campaigns for civil rights."
"This book analyzes the emancipation activism of free black people who settled in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois. Antebellum activists defined emancipation on their own terms, through the construction of churches, schools, and political conferences"
"Autobiography of an American woman, a pioneer civil rights activist and feminist. Granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner, growing up in the "colored" section of Durham, North Carolina in the early 20th century, she rebelled against the segregation that was an accepted fact of life in the South."
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