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Black Studies
Black Studies Librarian: Robert Ridinger
Founders Memorial 15E
815-753-1367
rridinger@niu.edu
Web Resources
- "With An Even Hand" Brown v. Board at Fifty
- Afrocentric Sites
- Africa Focus: Sights and Sounds of a Continent
- African American Sheet Music, 1820-1920
- African American Web Connection(AAWC)
- African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection
- African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts
- African Art, African Voices
- African Diaspora Archaeology Network
- African Elections Project
- African-American Band Music & Recordings, 1883- 1923
- Africans in America
- Intended as a teaching adjunct to a six-hour public television series covering the history of slavery in the US from its beginning to the end of the Civil War, this well-organized site is divided into four sections. The first, The Terrible Transformation, deals the period between 1450 and 1750, followed by The Revolution (1750-1805). Brotherly Love (1791-1831) illuminates the world of the free blacks using the Philadelphia community as an example. The last section, Judgment Day (1831-1865) traces the more familiar story of slavery during the years leading up to and during the Civil War.
- Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1719-1820
- AFSCME, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike
- An Address to the Colored Citizens of the United States by John B. Meachum (Philadelphia, 1846)
- Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu, Library of Congress
- Artists in Dialogue: António Ole and Aimé Mpane
- Atlanta in the Civil Rights Movement
- Avalon Project at Yale Law School: African-Americans-- Biography, Autobiography and History
- Benin-Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria
- Black Europeans
- Black Grooves : Archives of African American Music and Culture
- Black History at Harpweek
- Black Members of the United States Congress, 1879 - 2004
- Boston African Americana Project
- Detroit Public Television's American Black Journal
- Documenting the American South: The Church in the Southern Black Community
- Doris Ulmann Photograph Collection
- Eubie Blake Collection, The
- European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia
- Explorations in Black Leadership
- Harlem History
- Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts
- In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience
- Independent Lens: Banished -- American Ethnic Cleansings
- I've Known Rivers: The MoAD Diaspora Stories Project
- James B. Duke Memorial Library: Archives
- Job Sprawl and the Spatial Mismatch between Blacks and Jobs
- Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery
- Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits
- Mapping the African American Past
- Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power
- New Philadelphia: A Multiracial Town on the Illinois Frontier
- Paul Revere Williams Project
- Postcards from Manhattan: The Portrait Photography of Carl Van Vechten
- Race, Immigration and America's Changing Electorate
- Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches
- Read or listen to transcripts of speeches by famous African Americans.
- Slave Narratives
- Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
- This contains over a hundred pamphlets and books concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. This site is searchable by key word or browse by subject, author, or title index.
- Sonja Haynes Stone Center Library for Black Culture and History Guide to the Web
- Southern Poverty Law Center
- The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded a quarter of a century ago for the purpose of winning equal rights for minorities and poor people through legal action. Today the Center continues to pursue action against those who would attack the freedoms of others, while also promoting tolerance, understanding, and justice through education and publicity. This site is well organized and leads the user to a wealth of material related to civil rights and civil liberties.
- The Black Renaissance in Washington, D.C., 1920s-1930s
- The Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the Silver Screen, 1912-1930s
- The Civil Rights Digital Library
- The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860 - 1960
- The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965-2000
- The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa
- The State of Public School Integration: Brown vs. Board of Education at 50
- This Far By Faith: African American Spiritual Journeys
- Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection of Photographs
- Over 300 images from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taken primarily in the Richmond and Central Virginia areas.
- Thurgood Marshall Law Library: Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
- Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture
- Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
- Virginia Black History Archives
- We Shall Overcome
- Wilbur "Buck" Clayton Collection
- Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Afrocentric Sites
E-journals/news services
Organizations
Genealogy
- Afrigeneas
- "A mailing list focused on genealogical research and resources in general and on African ancestry in particular"
Literature
- African American Women Writers of the 19th century
- This site makes available several dozen works, each text scrupulously reprinted with no posthumous editing, each preface intact, from 30 hitherto inaccessible volumes of 19th century African American women's literature. This site is well organized, providing search tools that allow the reader to search by title, author, and genre.
- Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives
- Islamic Manuscripts from Mali
- Jackson Davis Collection
- A collection of over 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students, taken in the first half of the twentieth century. Davis' goal was to show the terrible conditions in many black schools and how they could be improved. The collection is housed at the University of Virginia.
- Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection
- Reading Women Writers and African Literature
- The Zora Neal Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress
- The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress present a selection of ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until they were rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection.
Museums
- African American Odyssey
- The purpose of this virtual exhibition is to "give a comprehensive, rich picture of more than 200 years of African American struggle and achievement." This site is organized in nine sections, among them, Slavery, The Civil War, Reconstruction, Depression, New Deal, World War II, and Civil Rights.
- Association of African American Museums
- Black Loyalists
- A digital collection of primary and secondary documents tracing the history of the African Americans who accepted the British promise (first stated by Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia in a 1775 proclamation included in this collection) during the American Revolution that any slave of a rebel who came over to their side would be granted freedom and land. The 30,000 men and women who acted on this offer found themselves at war's end in Nova Scotia, and the promised land never materialized, leading many to emigrate to Sierra Leone.
- Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators
- Housed at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, this colorful site traces the entry of African Americans into both civilian and military pilot corps. The first section begins with the story of Bessie Coleman, who became the first licensed black pilot in 1922 (although she had to study in France, and died young in 1926), and follows the growth of her successors up to 1934. The training provided at six black colleges and the Tuskegee Institute prior to World War II and the birth of the Tuskegee 99th Fighter Squadron in 1941 is covered in the second section. The 99th was joined by three other squadrons- the 100th, 301st and 302nd during World War II, where they combined into the 332nd Fighter Group, the famous ô Red Tails ô, whose colorful history is chronicled in the third section. The final death blow to segregation within the Armed Forces was given by President TrumanÆs Executive Order 9981, profiled in the final section.
- Cutting to the Essence, Shaping for the Fire. Yoruba and Akan Art
- Cycles: African Life Through Art
- Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project
- Henry O. Tanner
- National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, Tennessee)
- Studio Museum in Harlem
- The Anacostia Musuem and Center for African American History and Culture
- Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity
Research Centers
- Amistad Research Center (Tulane University)
- Been Here So Long: Selections from the WPA American Slave Narratives
- "Complete texts of seventeen of the 2,300 slave narratives collected as part of the Federal Writers Project".
- Black Film Center/Archive
- "A repository of films and related materials on African Americans."
- Center for Black Music Research (CBMR)
- Dred Scott Digital Project
- Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project
- Minority Health Archive
- Museum of African-American History (Boston)
- National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
- Our Shared History: Celebrating African American History and Culture
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Festivals and Culture
- The American Memory Project
- (The Library of Congress).
- The Center for Black Business History, Entrepreneurship, and Technology
- The Katherine Dunham Collection at the Library of Congress
- The King Center: The Beloved Community
- The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute
- Secondary documents written about Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as primary documents written during King's life.
- The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony
- During the Civil War, Union-occupied Roanoke Island, which lies between the North Carolina mainland and the barrier islands known as the Outer Banks, became home to thousands of former slaves. Initially, these refugees settled near the Union headquarters, creating a community that included churches and a school. In the spring of 1863, this camp evolved into a government-sanctioned colony. This site presents an introduction to the colony and the colonial experiment that was conducted there. It also features some primary sources and projects for students.
- University of Miami Libraries: Lydia Cabrera Papers
Festivals and Culture
